


Nothing But One Of My Nine Lives

by dopekanna



Series: Harry Potter and the Snake Sage [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Naruto
Genre: (it's probably been longer than that), Artistic Liberties, Book 1: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Canonical Character Death, Crack Treated Seriously, Gen, Inspired by Fanfiction, Not Beta Read, Orochimaru is Harry Potter, Ravenclaw Harry Potter, Reincarnation, author also stopped reading shippuden after the pein invasion arc, author has read neither harry potter nor naruto in at least five years, like. a lot of artistic liberties, original characters are orochimaru's parents and some snakes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-05
Updated: 2021-02-18
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:54:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 62,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25721674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dopekanna/pseuds/dopekanna
Summary: Orochimaru is reborn as Harry Potter, but the Snake Sannin brought over more than just memories.Inspired by blackkat's "shed one skin".
Series: Harry Potter and the Snake Sage [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2181222
Comments: 167
Kudos: 1083
Collections: Identity Crisis, Moonstruck Blossom's favorites, Orochimaru's adventures in world hopping, Rhyne's Chakra Coils, The Harry Potters





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [shed one skin](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16134056) by [blackkat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackkat/pseuds/blackkat). 



> I read "shed one skin" a while back and I thought it was *fascinating* and then it kind of spiraled out of control from there.
> 
> Title inspired by one of Mercutio's lines in "Romeo and Juliet". 
> 
> Note: Parseltongue is denoted with alligator brackets.

On the sixth day of genin training, Jiraiya had asked him why he didn’t have a clan name, why he was just “Orochimaru”, even though all the other shinobi treated him like he was from a ninja clan. The idiot had gotten a fist to the face from Tsunade for his ignorance, but at the time Orochimaru had just sighed and pointed to the purple outlines around his eyes.

“We have no clan name, but these markings show that I am of the snakes,” he’d explained to his prone teammate.

Orochimaru couldn’t remember what Jiraiya had said afterwards, but it must’ve been something stupid because he did remember Sarutobi-sensei physically lifting Tsunade off the ground by her armpits before she could lunge at Jiraiya again. He wondered he if would see the three of them again, now that he was in Purgatory.

His death had been an anticlimactic end to a chaotic life, and almost ridiculously sentimental for someone who had committed the crimes he had. _Orochimaru, the legendary Snake Sannin, Shodaime Otokage, traitor to Konohagakure, former S-rank missing nin and bogeyman of shinobi children, passed away from natural causes due to old age, in his home in Otogakure,_ he thought. _He was surrounded by his friends and family_. _Imagine that._

 _Speaking of homes_ , Orochimaru found himself outside the gates of his clan’s residence near Konohagakure. The pale stone walls surrounding the property almost shone under the light of the full moon, and he wondered why this was his Purgatory. He’d heard the tales of what the Konoha shinobi had seen in Purgatory during Pein’s invasion. It was different for each person; sometimes they saw a loved one in their home, sometimes they were in complete darkness with only the voices of strangers to follow, and sometimes they were alone in a plain, foggy field, left to contemplate their existence until they carried on to the Pure Lands. But his Purgatory was his childhood home, and though it was his home for over a third of his life, Orochimaru hadn’t returned to it since he had defected from Konoha. _Why here, and why now?_

He tucked his hands into the sleeves of his white kimono and walked through the open gates, along the stone path that wandered through the veritable forest of bamboo that surrounded the actual house. The air was empty of the cricket chirps and near-silent movement of the resident snakes that he was expecting, but the stone lanterns along the path were lit with small flames. The last time he’d seen those lanterns lit was when he was a child –

 _When Mother and Father were still alive._

Orochimaru took off in a frantic run along the path. This was his Purgatory, yes, but maybe it wasn’t _just_ his. He broke through where the bamboo ended, right at the edge of the garden outside the living area of the house, and almost tripped into the little pond he’d picked lotus flowers from as a child. The house was as it was when he was that young too, an elegant, well-maintained building made of dark wood and light paper walls. His parents – _Father, Mother_ – were sitting next to each other on the edge of the porch, drinking sake and talking quietly to each other. 

Tears welled up in Orochimaru’s eyes. _How long has it been_? he almost cried out in grief. There was his mother, the clan head, a tall woman with short, spiky black hair, her complexion seemingly bloodless as her child’s was, and yellow snake’s eyes surrounded by purple markings that looked like they could pierce through anything. There was his father, the Yamanaka man with his birth clan’s long, blond hair and his wife’s clan’s markings tattooed around his own eyes. They hadn’t aged a day in the near century that it had been since he had last seen them alive, both still dressed in the jounin uniform that they had been slain in.

His mother looked away from his father and towards Orochimaru, her eyes widening a fraction. His father followed her gaze and gave Orochimaru a smile that he’d thought he’d forgotten.

“Orochimaru, my child, come here,” his mother beckoned, and the legendary Snake Sannin ran around the pond, across the garden, and tackled his parents in an crushing embrace, knocking their sake off the porch and onto the ground. His father yelped in surprise as the extra weight caused the three of them to collide with the wooden porch, but Orochimaru just held him closer and cried into his shoulder. 

“Look at how old you’ve grown,” his father half-chuckled, half whispered, brushing Orochimaru’s long black hair from his face, “You went right past us, and then some.” Orochimaru cried harder at that, and his father grimaced at his poor choice of words. He patted the back of Orochimaru’s head, hoping it would soothe him.

“We missed you so much, hatchling,” his mother said, wiping tears from her eyes. “You look just like your father.”

“Nonsense, Mother. I could never pass for a Yamanaka,” Orochimaru laughed hoarsely.

“No, she’s got a point. If you dyed your hair, put in some contacts, and got a tan, you’d fit right in,” his father said, pulling the three of them upright again. Orochimaru set his feet back down on the ground, stepping between the fallen bottle and cups, but never letting go of either of his parents. _If they’re here, then that means…_

“Did you wait for me here? For all this time?” Orochimaru whispered, tears threatening to blur his vision again. His mother leaned up and wiped them away from his eyes.

“Of course, Orochimaru,” she said, “We wanted another chance to see you again, to give you a choice.” Orochimaru gently laid his own hands on his mother’s hand on his face.

“What do you mean? What choice?”

“Our greatest regret was leaving you,” his father said, “We waited here to see whether or not you wanted to stay in the Pure Lands with us forever, or if you wanted to be reincarnated with us, as a family again.”

Orochimaru gasped. “Can…can we even do that?” 

His mother nodded firmly. “Several years ago, the Sage of Six Paths approached us and offered to do so. He told us that few wait for the living to join them in Purgatory as long as we have, and that he owed you a favor for helping to seal his mother away.”

“That’s very…generous of him,” Orochimaru said, slowly lowering himself down to his knees, exhausted. _A personal favor from the Sage of Six Paths himself. What did I do to deserve this?_ “Would we remember who we were to each other?”

“The Sage said he could guarantee that your mother and I would be together again, and you would be our child,” his father said, “He doesn’t have control over what memories our souls retain after reincarnation though. We would probably just feel that we’ve met each other before.”

“What do you say, Orochimaru? We’ll go to the Pure Lands with you anyways, but do you want to stay there or do you want to reincarnate?”

Orochimaru sucked in a sharp breath. Either way he would be with his parents, his _family_ , but if he had to choose…

“What do you two want to do?” he asked. His parents gave each other a knowing look, a conversation unsaid in a second, and it was his mother who spoke.

“We want another chance to be a family.”

 _Me too_ , he thought, and he smiled at his beloved family once more.

“Well, there’s no rush to go on to another life,” he said as he picked up the sake bottle and cups from the ground, “How about I tell you some tales about your grandchildren?”

\---

One night in the Gryffindor common room, a curious thought came to James Potter while he was studying for the night’s Astronomy class.

“Say, Lily, have we met somewhere before?”

“Sorry, didn’t catch that. What did you say, James?”

“Did we meet each other? Before we came to Hogwarts?”

“Hm…I don’t think so. Only wizard I knew before coming to Hogwarts was Severus.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Be nice, James, or I won’t help you find Hydrus on that star map.”

\---

When he married Lily, he felt that déjà vu again. Or maybe he thought Lily’s eyeshadow wasn’t quite the right shade of purple ( _still lovely though_ ). 

Again, when Harry was born, he felt that he’d done this before, different and yet the same. It was like listening to an orchestra play a symphony in a theater, but you were just outside the doors to the house, and if you just opened the doors, you’d hear the whole symphony, and realize it was something else altogether.

\---

When the evil presence broke through the wards around Godric’s Hollow, James finally remembered.

_It had been a blazing summer day in Konoha when he had seen her. He’d been covering for the chuunin on the afternoon shift that had been saddled with mission desk duty at the last minute, manning the register, when she had walked into the store. She was in her fatigues and flak jacket (must’ve just come back from a mission, he thought), and instead of perusing the shop like the usual customer did, she headed straight for the register. A regular customer, then, with specific orders._

_He was frozen still by her piercing eyes. Yellow, surrounded by purple, on a face that looked like it was painted white. How deadly. How beautiful._

_“I’m guessing the Yamanaka-san I saw at the mission desk is the one you’re covering for?” she asked when she stopped at the register._

_“That’s correct, shinobi-san. I’m Yamanaka Ryou, how may I help you?” he said, trying to not stare into her eyes too hard. The kunoichi smirked at him, and Ryou felt a chill run down the back of his neck._

_“ <Give me as many lilies of the valley as you’re legally allowed to sell to me>,” she hissed, shoving herself forward into his personal space. Ryou almost flinched back, but now he was kind of curious how she managed to sound so much like a snake. How did she do that? Was staring at a customer’s mouth weird or rude? Right, he thought, it’s both._

_“Nice try, Orochie, but you’re not the only poison fanatic in this village! Just because Youko isn’t here doesn’t mean you can pull a fast one on the guy who doesn’t normally deal with your crazy requests!” the Yamanaka clan head’s voice rang out from down the hall behind the register, “Ryou, her order’s under the register, second shelf to the right!”_

_Orochie clicked her tongue in annoyance and leaned back, and Ryou let out a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding in. He crouched down and picked up her order; a small bundle of lilies in the valley, wrapped in brown paper._

_“Sorry, Orochie-san, you know how Yamanaka-sama is,” he said as he rang her out. He printed her receipt, grabbed a pen, scribbled something on the back of it, tucked it into the bundle of flowers, and handed the whole package to her. “Thank you for shopping with us, we hope to see you in the future.”_

_“Thank you, Yamanaka-san,” Orochie said in an even tone, taking the flowers and walking right out the door. Ryou saw her walk to the other side of the street, dig out the receipt from the bundle, read his message, and look right at him through the storefront window. He felt that he was being…appraised. Analyzed. Examined, but with curiosity. He gave her a soft smile, and she returned it with one of her own, a smile of sharp teeth that shone under the Fire Country sun. She waved to him, and jogged down the street with her flowers._

_When Ryou came in for his regular morning shift the next day, when Yamanaka-sama would normally be doing the rounds at T &I, he found her waiting outside the doors, clothed in a deep purple yukata, wicker basket in hand. _

_“Like I said. As many as you can legally sell me, handsome Yamanaka-san,” she said._

_“Ah, yes,” he said, red rising to his cheeks, “Of course, Orochie-san.” Yamanaka-sama and the other poison specialists who needed to restock their supplies this month would kill him for this, but Ryou found that he was okay with that. In the end, he only got two overnight shifts at T &I, and his food was only tampered with emetics by mysterious assailants in the village four times before certain people started having issues with snake infestations in their homes.  
_

“James?” Lily asked him, gently shaking his arm. Her brows were furrowed, and James wondered if she remembered. Everything was coming back to him in bits and pieces, but not fast enough, and even then he knew that if remembered any jutsus in time, they wouldn’t be enough to stop the immediate threat.

“This is it, isn’t it? He’s gotten past the wards,” he whispered. _Sage, I wanted more time with them._

“The wards – Wormtail betrayed us?!”

“Seems he took the whole rat thing a little too far, but then again, I suppose rats are prey animals to snakes. Lily, I need you to go up to Harry’s room and run.”

“James, no, please – “

“One of us can die, but not both of us. Harry shouldn’t be an orphan!” James shouted, almost in tears. _We can’t do that to our child again, that’s why we’re here, isn’t it?_

The evil presence, that dark magic, was almost at their doorstep.

“Lily, please, go, get out of here with our son.” He drew his wand, blocking her from coming down the stairs with his back. A weight pressed onto his back, and James felt his wife kiss the top of his head.

“I love you,” Lily whispered into his hair. She gave him a quick hug and ran up the stairs. James realized as she got to the top of the stairs that her wand was right there on the coffee table in the living room, and he remembered his final, fatal mission. 

_I’m sorry_ , James thought as the door burst open, and he flung an Expelliarmus at the Dark Lord. James knew he would die here, and as Voldemort swatted away James’ spell like it was a fly and threw a Killing Curse right back, James remembered one last memory, and it was all he needed. Yamanaka Ryou may not have been born into the clan of the snakes, but he had died as part of it, and that bond had not broken on his death. For his final act on Earth, James Potter sank as much magic as he could into the summoning bond tied with his bloody signature on the snake contract Ryou had signed the day he married Orochie, and hoped that Lily would remember too.

\---

In Ryuuchi Cave, the White Snake Sage felt a beloved clan member die too early _again_ , and cursed the Sage of Six Paths so violently he summoned himself out of the Pure Lands to figure out what the hell had her so riled up.

\---

Lily was about to grab Harry out of the cradle when a burst of James’ magic flowed into her, and then she remembered everything. Another lifetime of being Orochie and fighting for a village and concocting deadly poisons that no one could trace and suddenly she realized _chakra was magic repackaged and magic was unpackaged chakra_. In her mind hundreds of new spells came to mind, inspired by the jutsu she had lived and breathed a lifetime ago. She also remembered the hidden conversations of the snakes in the grass, spoken in her past native tongue, and she was _furious_ at their betrayal. Her soul was clan, and snakes did not betray _clan_ , even if clan did not remember you, much less itself _._

 _James, you knew all along, but we remembered too late._ Indeed it was too late; a thud down the hall, a dark presence so hateful and violent that her son – _Harry I’m so sorry_ – cried instinctively in fear, and in her heart she knew that with her current body, it was too late to run. But if there was one thing that Lily Evans Potter could do better than any witch her age, it was adapt to terrible situations, and with a head full of seals and the clan jutsus already being reworked for her new body, she could help her husband set the stage for the Dark Lord’s downfall.

She bit into her thumb, blood seeping into her mouth, and she swiped the bloody digit along the rail of Harry’s crib, pouring her magic into the seal.

\---

In Konohagakure, an old man with his lord’s face jumped away from his desk suddenly as he felt a huge amount of familiar chakra flare up from Ryuuchi Cave. It was not the same as he remembered, but there was only one family he knew that had such abrasive chakra. Elsewhere in the village, a man with pale skin and blue hair dropped a glass of water and clutched at his heart, and his partner rushed to his aid. “The bond – someone that feels like my parent is pouring _so much_ chakra into our summoning bond with the snakes,” he wheezed, “and Sage, are they _pissed_.”

In Otogakure, the Nidaime Otokage and his clone-siblings felt the chakra of their parent’s parent swell in the Cave, and their hearts ached for a grandparent they never knew.

In Ryuuchi Cave, the White Snake Sage and the Sage of Six Paths watched in despair and horror as a chakra impression of an unfamiliar woman with fiery hair and a very familiar soul raged in the court of snakes.

“A curse on Voldemort! A curse on the line of Slytherin!” Lily-who-was-once-Orochie screamed and sobbed, her voice echoing and distorted with voices of lives past and present, “He disgraces the will of the Sage of Six Paths, murdered my husband, and plans to murder me! He seeks to murder my son, the heir! The Wizarding snakes betray us for false power!”

In the mind of every snake in the Wizarding realm, that voice rang loud and clear, and the snakes looked towards Godric’s Hallow and no matter how far away they were, they felt the clan magic, uninhibited by the stain of banishment, in humans for the first time in over a millenium, and those who had allied with the Dark Lord were ashamed that they had been so easily lured by a pretender with empty promises of a return to glory. 

Voldemort felt none of this, only a huge surge in magic behind the nursery door, but not enough to make him hesitate. He was by far the stronger wizard here, and as he opened the door he did not even flinch at the venomous yet familiar aura surrounding Lily Potter. 

At the end of it all, much, much later, he would remember this night and wonder if Lily Potter had a distant Slytherin ancestor. 

The dark wizard quickly threw a Killing Curse at her point blank, filling the room with bright green light and a piercing scream. When the Avada Kedavra’s light faded, Lily’s corpse was sprawled on the cream-colored carpet. Voldemort stepped over it without a second thought and leaned over the nursery crib rail, ignoring the line of blood still dripping off of it. The infant looked up at him with curious green eyes.

Just before Voldemort said his final Killing Curse of the night, he could’ve sworn he’d felt a cold hand pulling on his wand arm and heard someone whisper a plea in his mind: _don’t do this._ As if that would’ve made a difference to the Dark Lord.

There was a green light, and love sealed in blood saved little Harry Potter.

\---

One Halloween night, Harry Potter was left in a basket on his aunt’s front door, a scar on his forehead and a letter in his tiny hands. The snakes of 4 Privet Drive who lived under the bushes by the kitchen window watched the sleeping infant and remembered the final message of a twice-slain clan head. They watched over young Harry Potter and called him “Young Lord Potter” and mourned the loss of the Lady Potter-who-was-once-Orochie and her Lord-who-was-once-Yamanaka, and promised to raise her son as best as they could.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd give you an update schedule but then I'd be lying through my teeth (src: my other fanfic which ended like a year overdue). 
> 
> I'll try for at least one chapter a month for the rest of the year?


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter brought to you early by a massive OS update that left me with nothing much to do but write for 8 hours straight.
> 
> Edit Sep 30, 2020: Reread this particular chapter and hoo boy did it need to be cleaned up. That's what I get when I have to change the verb tense 3/4 of the way through writing a nearly 10k chapter.

Petunia Dursley didn't go to her sister's funeral. She was rather busy that day rearranging her house, life, and future to care for two infants, and Vernon was refusing to be of any help. When Albus Dumbledore finally visited her that evening, still dressed in his heavy gray mourning robes, he found Petunia, exhausted and barefaced, sitting on the third step of the stairs in the main hallway of her small home, clutching his letter. Vernon was nowhere to be seen, but Dumbledore could hear his heavy footsteps in the small kitchen down the hall. Petunia looked up at him, exhaustion written all around her eyes. 

“A letter, Dumbledore? You really thought a letter was the best way to tell me my sister was _murdered?_ ”

“My apologies, Mrs. Dursley, but the past 24 hours have been rather hectic. There were many loose ends to…tie up, especially since the war ended so dramatically, but I had all intentions of visiting you as soon as I could.”

“Of course,” she said with disbelief underlying her voice, “When is their funeral?” 

“Lily and James were buried at Godric’s Hollow this morning – “ 

Petunia stood up swiftly, grasping at the railing.

“And you didn’t bother to write that?” she yelled, shaking the letter in Dumbledore’s face, but she swayed from the delayed vertigo. Dumbledore walked towards her, held her steady, and guided her back down to the step on the stairs. He sat beside her; it was probably the first time he had sat down all day since he felt the wards on Godric’s Hollow break.

“With all due respect, we thought that you and your sister were estranged,” he sighed, but he knew what she would say next.

“She was still my sister,” Petunia said, her voice cracking as she began to cry.

“I’m sorry, Petunia. We should’ve waited for you.”

Petunia sniffled and wiped away tears with the heel of her hand. “It’s done, just tell me how I can go see her later. But, Dumbledore,” and she turned to the wizard, her brows creased together, “we can’t raise her son.”

“He has no other living family, and by law you take precedence over his godparents and the Ministry for guardianship rights. You are the only ones who _can_ care for him; none of us in the Order think we have the means or resources to raise him, I haven’t been able to get in contact with his godfather and I am apprehensive to leave him in any kind of orphanage. Harry is the savior of the Wizarding world. Many would seek to exploit him for his fame, and a few would not hesitate to kill the infant that defeated their leader. Meanwhile, you are all but unknown to most wizards. Those of us who know who you are know that you want nothing to do with magic anymore, which is precisely why a wizarding child is safest with you.”

“Hidden where you would least expect,” she said.

“Precisely,” he said, and Petunia sighed and was about to say something when the kitchen door slammed open and Vernon Dursley stormed towards the pair, face beet red.

“Petunia, don’t let this crackpot convince you to have one of those _freak_ children in our house. Their lot lets murderers run wild and drops their offspring onto good, normal folks like us; we will not be part of their nonsense!” he sputtered at his wife, spit flying everywhere. Some of it landed on Petunia’s face, but she wiped it off without looking at him.

Dumbledore looked up at Vernon’s red, furious face and calmly stood up and stepped down to the ground level. He looked down on Vernon with a warm expression that betrayed the stern tone of his voice.

“People like you slaughtered our kind by the hundreds centuries ago. Muggles feared magic, and wizards feared violence. Thus, we wizards came together and chose to remove ourselves from your society altogether, so that we did not have to watch our children burn at the stake. Over time though, that fear turned into hatred in some wizarding families. Parents who once told their children to avoid Muggles because they feared losing their children to the stake now told them that the Muggle was a weak creature who persecuted us out of fear of wizards gaining their supposed rightful place above them in society. My father and sister died because of that ignorance, and so have many others, Muggle and wizard alike.”

“Normalcy is relative, Mr. Dursley. You would not be ‘normal’ among a crowd of witches and wizards, and I would not be ‘normal’ in a crowd of Muggles. The reason why the Potters were murdered was because there are wizards who think like you, who think that hate is more productive than love. Regardless of what you believe, your actions have and always will affect the world. You were part of this conflict long before you were born, you are part of it now, and you will influence it long after you are dead. If nothing else, though, I do not want to risk seeing another infant being harmed or murdered simple for his birthright.” Vernon, who had puffed his chest and crossed his arms when Dumbledore was speaking, had dropped his arms to his sides, his face pale with horror. Albus Dumbledore was, if nothing else, a teacher, and he was more than capable of drawing guilt out of even the most unexpected students.

Dumbledore turned back to Petunia. “Will you take Harry into your home, Mrs. Dursley?”

She sighed, running a hand through her cropped hair, and looked at him with dry eyes. “Our only income is Vernon’s, and we knew we could only afford one child.”

“I’ll see what I can do to alleviate some of your burden, then. Thank you very much, Mrs. Dursley.”

“Now wait just a minute – “ Vernon shouted, blocking the door.

“We’re _done_ , Vernon. I will not kick an orphaned baby out of our home,” Petunia snapped, “Let the headmaster leave.”

Her husband did not move, but Dumbledore stepped towards him, and Vernon felt a heavy invisible, weight surround him, itching with simmering tension. Reluctantly, Vernon stepped to the side, dropping his gaze to his shoes. Dumbledore walked to the door, turned back and nodded to Dursleys, and left the home at 4 Privet Drive. As he walked out to the street, a rust-colored adder slithered out of the grass and followed him.

“<Headmaster, you’re making a mistake>,” it said, “<These humans, they will hurt Young Lord Potter.>”

Dumbledore whirled around to face the snake; did it just call Harry Potter what he thought it did?

“<I have watched the Dursleys for many years. They are prejudiced, and they will be cruel to our young lord. Please, Dumbledore, you must take him away from here. Leave our young lord in an orphanage or take him into your own home, but don’t leave him here.>”

Dumbledore shook his head. “I cannot raise a child. There is too much work for me to do, and I would be a terrible father figure. You must have heard my conversation; you know why he must live here.”

The snake hissed in frustration. “<Then _we_ will raise the Lord>,” she proclaimed, and she disappeared back under the bushes under the kitchen window before Dumbledore could ask her why she called the Potter boy a lord.

\---

When the boy was two years old, he was left to his own devices most of the day. The woman did not look at him, play with him, talk to him, unless she was feeding him, or clothing him, or helping him take a bath, and even then, her voice was monotone and emotionless. She played with the other boy, the bigger boy, laughed with him, encouraged him, had whole one-sided conversations with him. One day, when the boy moved his hand towards the toy blocks in the nursery, the block levitated off the floor, and he started laughing. The woman walked into the room, wondering why the boy was laughing when he barely spoke, and she froze. He looked to her to show her what miracle he had performed, but she looked at him with a face he didn’t like, one that made him want to cry. He released the force on the block down, and the woman walked out and slammed the door.

“<Disgusting woman>,” a voice whispered from outside his window, “<Magic is a gift. Young Lord Potter should be cherished.>”

“<Remarkable control for such a young boy>,” another said, “<He’s quite talented.>”

“<Thank you>,” the boy said, “<But why are you calling me ‘Young Lord Potter’?>” Two snakes, one gray, one yellow, poked their heads out from the bottom of the window.

“<That’s your title, Young Lord. You’re Harry Potter, and since you’re the heir to the clan of snakes, you’re our Young Lord Potter>,” the gray snake said.

“<They just call you ‘boy’, no wonder you don’t know your own name>,” the yellow one said, but the boy frowned at that.

“<But I already have a name>,” he said, “<Orochimaru.>”

That night, he dreamed of a village embedded in a canyon, long wooden and rope bridges crisscrossing a chasm too deep to fathom. He dreamed of forests and laboratories and piles of bodies and battlefields of blood and carnage and he woke up crying about a home he could no longer see. He dreamed of an eternal night in his childhood home, regaling his parents with tales of his clone-children Log and Mitsuki, and choosing a new life together that was cut even shorter than the last, and he wished that fate wasn’t so cruel.

\---

When Orochimaru was three years old, he was left to play by himself in the back garden. It was decently sized and well kept, and Aunt and Uncle Dursley thought it was safe enough for him, so Orochimaru spent as much time out there as he could. His house was stifling at best, and they didn’t let their bully of a son out in the garden without supervision.

Whenever he was out, the snakes emerged from the shrubs and the trees and the shed and wrapped around his legs. They curled on his lap and around his shoulders and in his hair and complimented him on his warm body heat. He didn’t talk to them unless they were all alone (the lady next door once gave him a strange look when she heard him hissing to them), but they were very chatty and Orochimaru never missed his daily briefing of all the lurid gossip of the snakes of Little Whinging. 

“<Young Lord Orochimaru, why don’t you call yourself ‘Harry Potter’?>” a young grass snake curled in his lap asked one day. Its mother chided him, but Orochimaru just shook his head.

“<Because it was my name in my last life, and I like that name more.>”

“<But Harry Potter is The Boy Who Lived! It’s the name of the boy who saved the world. I think I like your other name very much.>”

The boy chuckled. “<Then _you_ may call me Young Lord Potter instead.>” The young snake hissed in delight.

The next day, an owl swooped into the garden and had its lunch in the middle of the lawn. Orochimaru recognized the green scales, the tiny body of the young grass snake who wanted to use his new name, and his heart dropped. It shouldn’t have been a big deal for someone with his memories, but Harry Potter was just a three-year-old boy whose only friends were the snakes, and he started to sob loudly. Vernon came out after a few minutes to yell at him to be quiet, but the boy only got louder.

“I’ve had enough of your whining!” the man yelled, and he grabbed the boy by his arm so tightly Orochimaru yelped at the vicegrip pain. He knew he couldn’t fight back and win with his body as it was, so he let himself be dragged back into the house and thrown into the dark cupboard under the stairs. He stumbled into the spare bed, a dusty excuse of a mattress covered in cobwebs and sawdust.

“Stay in there and shut up until dinner!” Uncle Vernon yelled at him through the door. Orochimaru sniffled and wiped away his tears, but he kept his mouth shut as he groped around in the darkness. He felt a strand of string wipe against his face, and he pulled on it. The tiny cupboard illuminated to reveal some wooden shelves and four curious snakes looking at him from up above; a large copper adder, a smaller green grass snake, and two tiny pythons, one black, one white.

“<Hatchling, are you hurt?>” the adder asked, her voice rough with age, but soothing to Orochimaru. He gingerly touched the arm Uncle Vernon grabbed him by and hissed in pain; he could already see the huge bruise forming.

“<Damn Dursleys, can’t even be nice to a child that isn’t their spoiled whelp>,” the green snake hissed in disgust.

“<Damn! Spoiled!>” the young pythons echoed, and the brown python swatted her green partner with her tail.

“<Language, Natha>,” she harrumphed, and she slithered down the shelf, towards Orochimaru. “<Do you know how to heal yourself?>”

He shook his head; in his last life he had the chakra control for medical ninjutsu, but his chakra itself was too poisonous for it. To be honest, he always relied on either Tsunade or Kabuto for his healing. Not to mention that as far as he could tell, he didn’t have a chakra organ system in this body; magic was something entirely different that he did not understand at all.

“<That’s fine; let me teach you how. Picture your injury healing in your mind, put your hand on it, and say> Episkey <like that.>” Orochimaru nodded, and he imagined the bruise going from yellow to purple to yellow again. He placed his hand on his arm carefully, and he whispered the spell. A flash of pain shot through his arm, but it soon subsided, and the bruise was gone.

“<Excellent work, Young Lord>,” Natha hissed. The two small pythons slithered down to stare at Orochimaru’s arm.

“<It’s gone! Pensie, Young Lord healed himself so well!>” they exclaimed in unison.

“<Of course. This hatchling is quite the talented young wizard>,” she praised, “<Hatchling, what bothers you today?>” The boy sniffled again, tears daring to return to his eyes, as he told the snakes of the death of the grass snake.

“<I remember so many people dying, and in my past life, I killed lots of people too. I don’t know why I got so upset over a snake dying>,” Orochimaru said when he finished.

Pensive nuzzled his cheek. “<Oh, hatchling, you may remember your past life, but you are living this one, and you are but a hatchling. It’s alright to be sad. How about I tell you the story of the first Snake Sage, to distract that lively mind of yours?>” Orochimaru’s head perked up, and the baby pythons wriggled in excitement.

“<Storytime!>” the white one chirped.

“<Pensie has a story!>” the black one echoed.

“<There is a Sage in this world?>” Orochimaru asked.

“<There was, many centuries ago>,” she said sadly, “<Blanche, Noire, settle down, and I will start the story.>”

The snakes (even Natha, who feigned sleep) and Orochimaru listened in rapt attention as the old adder told the tale of the first Sage whose face and name was lost even to the snakes’ history, but whose magic flowed through all snakes and humans of the clan. 

_The first Sage was a fisherman from the green isle where no snakes lived. One day when we he was out on the sea, he was caught in a terrible storm, and his boat was torn to pieces by the waves and the wind. The man was flung out to the deadly waters, where he drifted through the wild magic of the deep waters and absorbed it into his body. The magic carried him to the shores of our lands, where he woke up the next morning, surrounded the remains of his boat. He rose from the sand and felt the power coursing through his body, a gift from the water. Far away, he heard a low rumble, and he saw that further down the sands, a great sea serpent was beached on the sands. He approached the serpent; it was a beautiful master of the ocean, its scales like the finest topaz, and it was rumored to be as long as the world was round. As the man got closer, he saw that a piece of his boat had pierced the scales of the serpent. The great snake was writhing on the sand, trying to inch it out of its skin, but without success. It saw the man and spoke to him._

_“Human, if you are able to take this stake out of my skin, I will reward you with my greatest treasure for saving my life,” the serpent said._

_“I will help you, but I require no reward, great creature, for it is my boat’s wood that has harmed you so. Let me right this wrong,” the man said. He took hold of the large plank of wood in the serpent’s skin and pulled with a strength he did not know he had, and it came out of the serpent’s scales, covered in blood. The serpent roared in pain, but it began to slither back into the ocean without a word. The man called out to the retreating serpent._

_“Wait, creature, the sea salt will sting your wound!” the man cried, “Let me tend to your injuries before you return to your sea.”_

_“But I have only asked you to take out the stake,” the serpent said. “The wound will heal, even with the pain.”_

_“Surely it would scar if you leave it be! It was my boat that injured you; I can make sure it leaves no trace of the wound.”_

_“Do as you please,” the serpent told him, and the man put his hands on the serpent’s scales around the bleeding wound and drew upon his newfound magic. The serpent’s flesh knit itself back together and the blue scales regrew brighter than ever before, and like that it was as if there had been no wound at all._

_“You have done me a great favor, human, and for that I must reward you,” the serpent said, “What do you wish for? Gold? Power? Immortality?”_

_“Nay, great creature,” the man said, “I wish to know what you are.”_

_“What I am? Surely you have seen a serpent before?”_

_“I have not, great serpent. There are none of your kind where I am from, but if all serpents are like yourself, then I wish to know them all.”_

_The serpent was surprised, for its kind were either shunned or coveted for their powerful magic._

_“Why is that, human?” the serpent asked, curious._

_“Your scales are as beautiful as any jewel as I have seen, your body is larger than anything I have caught in the sea, and your words mean to brush me off, but you value the honesty of your own bargain. I have never met one like you, and you astound me.”_

_The serpent considered the man’s compliments and curiosity and nodded at him. “So be it. For one hundred nights I will wash ashore this beach and tell you a tale of my kind. In return, I ask that you tell me a tale of yours.”_

_The man agreed. He built a new home on the beach, lived off the sea’s bounty, and dabbled in his new magic, and for one hundred nights the sea serpent washed ashore and told him a tale of the snakes, and the man would tell him the legends of the humans._

_On the one hundredth night, after they had exchanged their greatest tales, the serpent said, “I have told you our greatest tales. My reward is paid.”_

_“Will you not come ashore anymore?” the man asked._

_“No, there is no reason for me to do so anymore,” the serpent said, but it felt a heavy weight on its soul._

_“I wish you would not go, dear friend. I would greatly miss our conversations,” the man said._

_“I am a friend to you?” the snake asked, surprised. No human had ever befriended a snake._

_“Of course, great serpent. You are my closest friend, one who I would mourn greatly should I never see you again,” the man proclaimed. The serpent was silent for a long moment._

_“So would I, my friend,” the serpent said, and it quickly slithered back into the ocean, the man’s cries of protest ignored. The man was distraught at the sudden disappearance of his friend; why had the serpent fled? He went back into his home and fell into restless sleep. In his dreams he saw the serpent shed its skin under the water, beautiful blue scales flaking away from its body, but before he could see the serpent’s new skin, he woke up to a knocking on his door._

_When he answered the door, he saw his visitor was a beautiful human with the yellow eyes of the serpent dressed in a robe of blue scales._

_“Do not mourn for me, my dear friend,” the serpent said, and the man was overjoyed as he embraced the serpent. For many years they remained companions and traveled the land, conversing with the snakes and leaving their own magic behind with their apprentices, some human and some snake. The man acquired all the snakes’ knowledge and learned to use their magic, and within his lifetime he was revered as the Snake Sage. When the Sage passed away, the sea serpent shed his skin again, and carried his beloved Sage’s body under the waves with himself, never to be seen again. The first apprentice of the Sage and the serpent inherited her masters’ purest magic upon his death, and from then on, the magic guaranteed that there was always a Sage to lead the clan._

Late that night, Mafalda Hopkirk of the Ministry’s Improper Use of Magic Office received her first notice that Harry Potter had used an Episkey spell. 

\---

When Orochimaru was four years old, he asked his Aunt Petunia how his parents died.

“Car crash. That’s how you got that scar on your head,” she said, not looking up from the dishes she was washing. He knew she was lying though; he remembered being in the nursery, smelling iron, and staring into the face of something even he knew was grotesque.

“<Your parents died protecting you from Voldemort – we call him You-Know-Who, for names have great power in this world>,” Pensie told him, “<That night, we discovered that your family was of our clan. Lady Potter censured him and the line of Slytherin and all snakes in the clan now know that that Dark wizard is to be shunned.>” Blanche and Noire curled a little closer to Orochimaru that night as he lay in bed.

He thought about the Sage of Six Path’s favor. He wasn’t sure whether to be angry at the Sage for putting him on a path where he would lose his parents even earlier, or at Voldemort for the murder itself. 

\---

When Orochimaru was five, Petunia left him alone at the library while she coaxed Dudley to a string of doctor’s appointments. He wandered through the small, musty building, barely glancing at the children’s books that the librarian tried to coax him towards and headed straight to the nonfiction books. Something in his mind felt at ease as he thumbed through a history of poisons, and he didn’t leave the library until closing. It was the closest yet he felt to being at home. 

At dinner, he asked his aunt and uncle if he could get a library card. It would be the one and only time in his life that he would ask them for anything not essential to his physical survival.

Surprisingly enough, it was Uncle Vernon who filled out the form and turned it in to the library. Orochimaru started to bring in stacks of texts about medicine and engineering and silently devour them in his cupboard. Dudley tried to be a bother to his _nerd, abnormal_ cousin, stomping on the stairs all the time and shouting, but Orochimaru was usually too engrossed in his books to care. In the evenings, he would read aloud to Blanche and Noire, and word got around the neighborhood snakes that Young Lord Orochimaru was a storyteller like old Pensie, and he soon acquired quite the serpentine audience each night, its members slithering through the unseen cracks and holes under 4 Privet Drive.

One night, just after he finished reading a short book about a little French girl with a bad case of appendicitis (with rousing hisses from the young hatchlings who asked him to read it to them _again_ ), Orochimaru thought about little Madeline’s Catholic boarding school. “<I’m starting school very soon. What’s it like?>”

His hopes for anything interesting were dashed when the snakes told him about Muggle schools. Academy-style lectures, _for 13 years?_ For Sage’s sake, he graduated _wartime_ Academy early; if he didn’t get private tutoring or pick up a very time-consuming hobby soon, he might try to start a war. At the very least, he now knew he’d have to start his physical conditioning training again and reworking his jutsu with magic. It would be an interesting challenge, starting from the very beginning of his training again; at least his arms weren’t sealed this time.

“<But Young Lord will go to Hogwarts in a few years, won’t he?>” Noire piped up.

“<Hogwarts?>” Orochimaru asked.

“<Britain’s Wizarding school>,” Natha said, and as the snake described it, Orochimaru was entranced by seven years of potion-making, spellcasting, and wandering around a magical castle that changed itself by the minute. Five or six years of Muggle school sounded a lot more tolerable if he got to spend the rest of his education at _Hogwarts_.

\---

When Orochimaru was six, he was sick of school. So. Very. Sick. Of. School.

It wasn’t his teachers’ fault that they didn’t realize that he didn’t need to be coddled. Social norms dictated that they treat him with care, far more than his foster family did, but he couldn’t help but feel a little insulted. The Snake Sannin didn’t need _nap time_ , thank you very much. English, maths, and science were almost insultingly easy, but art became his favorite subject. He could practice drawing seals in the guise of geometric scribbles; his art teacher took note and wondered if the boy would do well in a conservatory. It would all be tolerably dull if it weren’t for Dudley.

As Orochimaru expected, Dudley transitioned easily from the family’s golden child to the typical schoolyard bully. Orochimaru knew his cousin didn’t know any better, that Dudley was just a child who’d been raised by some of the worst parents Orochimaru had seen in either life, but good Sage the boy was horrible. Dudley was always pushing other kids around and taking what he wanted, because his Mum and Dad did it, so it must be the right thing to do, or so Orochimaru assumed of his cousin’s thought process. Unfortunately, it didn’t change the fact that Orochimaru was still his cousin’s favorite target.

“Harry, Mum said that I could have your lunch!” Dudley said as he tried to snatch the lunchbox that Orochimaru guessed predated the war. He swatted away Dudley’s hand and ran out the cafeteria, the yells of his teachers tapering away. He climbed up a tree along the fence and nibbled on the stale tuna sandwich and dry carrots his aunt threw in ( _he wouldn’t even want this_ ), watching his teachers run around the schoolyard looking for him. He’d had at least ten different opportunities to attack Dudley, to stab at a vital organ and shave 1, 2, 5, 10, 50 years off his cousin’s life, but in this world “training accidents” weren’t nearly as common as he’d liked. While he contemplated this ridiculous facet of society, a small brown snake in the tree slithered down from a branch above Orochimaru and rested its head on his own. 

“<Not a very entertaining show, is it, Young Lord?>” it asked.

“<Not really>,” he said.

“<I’ll see what I can do about that>,” the snake said, and it slithered back up the tree. A few minutes later, Orochimaru heard a scream as one of the teachers ran back into the building, away from the brown snake doing its best impression of a cobra. Orochimaru chuckled at that, wolfed down the rest of his lunch, and climbed down the tree. His homeroom teacher was waiting for him at the entrance of the cafeteria, another severely annoyed look on her face. She always tried to make an example of him in front of the rest of the school, but Orochimaru had had one lifetime of that already. He gracefully dodged all her attempts to grab at him as he returned to the cafeteria and the crowd of staring children, wondering how Potter could slip out of the teacher’s grasp like an eel. His teacher even tried to pounce on him like a cat, but he just stepped to the side, letting her eat dirt and grass and land face first right in front of the brown cobra imitator. The principal always tried to give him detention, but none of the adults could catch the infamous delinquent Potter.

When school finally let out for the day, Orochimaru had just walked out the gates when Dudley’s gang of bullies accosted him as usual. They threw the usual punches and kicks at him, but he dodged them all just as well as he had earlier that day and made a break for the forest behind the school. They didn’t follow him in – they never did, because their mummies and daddies said there were wolves, bears, and evil serial murderers in there ( _nonsense_ , Orochimaru thought, _there aren’t any wolves here_ ). Hiding in dangerous places was an old tactic from Orochimaru’s Academy days, when the older, deadlier bullies would chase him around the village, and he would escape into the Forest of Death for a few hours. That was before Jiraiya and Tsunade became his teammates.

 _But Jiraiya and Tsunade aren’t here_ , he reminded himself as he ran through the forest and towards his secret training grounds. It only took a few more minutes for him to reach it: a small clearing in the forest with a hole in an old birch tree where he stored his pilfered knives and wires.

(People here weren’t nearly as wary about pickpockets as they should’ve been.)

Natha slithered out of the brush and up Orochimaru's leg and back, lazily curling around his neck.

“<You aren’t hurt?>” the snake asked.

“<Not this time.>” Natha sighed in relief. 

“<What’s on the schedule today, hatchling?>” the snake asked as Orochimaru picked out a hunting knife from his collection. He’d stolen this one from a man he was at least 60% sure had used it to kill someone; the man’s killing intent was too strong to not belong to a murderer or a butcher.

“<Target practice, trying out those new charms Pensie told me about, reworking some C-ranks with magic, and then we’ll hit the library. Any book requests?>” He swung around and threw the knife across the clearing. It hit just a little off dead center on a crude target carved into a tree, and Orochimaru clicked his tongue. He was off-balance today, which meant that training would be frustrating, and he hadn’t even started thinking about how to convert his next set of jutsus to magic. He’d figured out that the key to magic was efficiently manipulating the energy outside the caster, but chakra was a manipulation of internal power; some jutsus lent themselves very easily to magic, but others, like a basic clone jutsu, were basically impossible.

“<Maybe something about the French Revolution? Lots of beheadings>,” Natha interrupted, hissing into Orochimaru’s ear, and his young lord smirked.

“<I like the sound of that>.”

Late at night, Dumbledore wandered through the damp third floor corridors of Hogwarts, a worrying letter from Nicholas Flamel tucked into his woolen robes, when a giant sand-colored python slithered out of a hole in the stone and encircled the wizard with its whole length.

“<Headmaster, our Young Lord is quite unhappy living with those Muggles>,” it says, “<It’s been over five years now. Surely someone can take him in now.>”

“His aunt had first claim, and Sirius is in Azkaban. Putting him in an orphanage would only destabilize his life, and there are people still looking for him.” There were still a handful of known Death Eaters unaccounted for, and Merlin forbid what they would do if they got their hands on Harry.

“<A two-legged stool would be more stable than those disgusting magic-hating bastards>,” the snake spat, “<A snake had to teach him healing spells when he was a toddler because they kept hurting him. Did you know he’s teaching himself physical self-defense?>.”

“No, I did not.” Dumbledore thought of the snippets he’d gotten of the home lives of the thousands of students that have passed through his school’s halls, and privately asked the deceased Potters for their forgiveness.

\---

When Orochimaru was seven, he realized his methodology had been wrong the whole time. He was in his secret training area one afternoon, fiddling with a knife (a nice kitchen knife, probably meant for sushi, fished out of the garbage can of a flat filled with rich uni students) when the solution came to him, and he threw down the knife in frustration.

“I am so blind!” he yelled, scaring away the birds in the trees.

“<Young Lord?>” Pensie asked from her post up above, hanging off a tree branch. It was her turn to babysit Orochimaru, lest he get eaten by wolves that he swore did not roam the forest.

“Chakra is physical and mental energy synthesized together, but magic is the dual usage of those energies to manipulate supernatural energy,” Orochimaru muttered to himself as he paced around the clearing, “I concentrate to prepare the spell, and then I use physical energy to coax the supernatural force. The components are there, but I don’t have the organ system to produce and process chakra, yet I’ve been trying to force my magic out a system that doesn’t exist in me! In theory, I could just combine the two energies, but where would I do that? How would I make a chakra producing organ? I don’t have any of my original cells and lab equipment to clone myself. Could try the ration pills – no, they only force organs to work faster, they don’t actually contain any chakra. The Sage got his chakra system from his mother who got it from the fruit of the God Tree” – and Orochimaru desperately hoped that there wasn’t a God Tree in this world, because he was _not_ willing to deal with that bullshit again – “but then how did the God Tree create that – “

_Wait. Do I even need a chakra-producing organ?_

Orochimaru picked up a leaf from the ground. He held it by the tips of his fingers, twirling it by its stem. _Physical and mental, Yin and Yang_ , he repeated in a mantra. 

At the very tips of the fingers holding the leaf, he forced the two energies there to mix together, swirling into each other and joining, _combining, almost like emulsifying_ –

The leaf burned to a crisp and the hot ash fell through his fingers. Textbook chakra overload reaction.

 _Huh. Guess my control needs a little more work_.

“<That’s an interesting thing you just did with your magic>,” Pensie hissed, staring at his hand.

“<Not magic – chakra>,” Orochimaru whispered in wonder, but then he thought about something that had been bothering him for a while. “<Pensie, you know a lot about magic. Can you use it yourself?>”

She shook her head. “<Once, a long time ago, when I was a young snake before the war. This body is old and I can’t sustain the magic anymore though. But show me what you can do with this chakra of yours>.”

Orochimaru grinned, and he picked up another leaf and stuck it on his head. “<Watch this.>”

Several weeks later, Mafalda Hopkirk climbed up the stairs to Dumbledore’s office and begged him to take Harry into Hogwarts early. 

“Headmaster, I’ve never seen anything like it! He’s practicing spells that I learned when I was a 7th year, spells I had to look up in the archives, spells we’ve never even seen before! Merlin’s beard, at one point we had to bring in an Unspeakable just to confirm that he hadn’t made a _Horcrux_ – “ and Dumbledore’s face twisted slightly in horror at the thought – “but no, he literally just used magic to make a clone of himself so similar that we thought it had the same soul! Headmaster, this boy needs a teacher, and probably a private tutor!”

Dumbledore shook his head. “The castle decides when its students arrive, not I. He is still so young; I fear it would do more harm than good to bring a boy here so early. He is safest with the family raising him.”

Mafalda frowned. “I wouldn’t be so sure. He’s used at least two healing spells every day for the past week.”

(Uncle Vernon tended to push people around when he was in a bad mood, and 4 Privet Drive was small. Grunnings had posted its first loss in years that week.)

Dumbledore thought about the day after the Potters died, of an exhausted Petunia and a belligerent Vernon, and he wondered if it really would’ve been better to have given Sirius custody over Harry before he had blown up Pettigrew. Would it have saved those Muggles' lives? Would Harry have been safer?

\---

When Orochimaru was eight, he met a witch at the library. Many of the witches and wizards who recognized him on the street would fawn over him in their wildly outdated and mismatching clothes and slang, but this one seemed far more comfortable in the Muggle world. She looked to be about nine or ten, and she was lugging around a huge messenger bag filled with what looked like heavy textbooks.

“Excuse me, but are you Harry Potter?” she asked in a quiet voice. He looked up at her from the book he had picked from the shelf, a mildly interesting biography on Lucrezia Borgia.

“Perhaps. Who are you?”

“I’m Cho Chang. I’m a witch, it’s very nice to meet you,” she said, holding out his hand. Orochimaru hesitated, but he took it in his own.

“Nice to meet you. Why are you carrying your weight in books?” he asked, pointing at her bag. She smiled at him, and he swore he saw a face he hadn’t seen in decades.

“Light reading,” she said, and she dropped the bag on the ground and started pulling out books. Orochimaru stared at the titles. _Curses and Counter-Curses. A History of Magic. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them._ All books about magic or the magical world. 

“Where did you get these?” he asked, pointing to the books, and Cho gave him a puzzled look.

“Flourish and Botts? Haven’t you been?” Orochimaru shook his head.

“The one in Diagon Alley?” he whispered in awe, putting down his biography and picking up _Curses and Counter-Curses_ and flipping through it. He’d have to try some of these out on Dudley if he got took annoying. “I’ve never been to a Wizarding place. My foster family doesn’t like magic.”

“Oh,” she said, awkwardly twirling her long hair, “I’m sorry they’re like that. Do you know how to use magic?”

Orochimaru nodded, but he looked around and found the library was full. He silently cast a genjutsu over them; if a Muggle looked at them, they’d see and hear a pair of children reading through some age appropriate young adult novels, and they’d be compelled to move along. 

Cho felt the shift in energy around them and gaped at him. “You can cast spells without saying them?”

“It’s how I’ve always done it. I learned a bunch of spells from my – “ and he almost said ‘snakes’, but Pensie had told him the prejudice around snakes and Dark Magic so many years ago, and this was his first chance to get some proper magic literature – “my friend. There was a witch in my class at school last year, and she told me how to cast a few, like Episkey.”

“Really? I haven’t gotten the hang of it, but I’d think it’d useful for when I break my nose playing Quidditch.”

“Quidditch? What’s that?”

Cho gasped, and for the next hour she explained the game and how to fly on a broom, and then they got on to levitation spells, and by the time Cho’s mother found them sitting in the biography aisle, they were reverse-engineering the bewitchment on Bludgers.

“Hi Mum,” she whispered as she and Orochimaru traced out the ancient runes that were the precursors to the original bewitchment.

“I see you two are having fun” she asked, eyes glancing at the jutsu surrounding her, and she turned to Orochimaru. “Hello, Mr. Potter. I’m Madam Chang. We’ve never met, but I knew your mother when we were at Hogwarts.”

“Really?” Orochimaru and Cho said simultaneously. Madam Chang nodded and kneeled down, the silk of her rose qipao barely even wrinkling.

“Yes, she was quite the firebrand. I spent my third year tutoring her to a passing grade in Charms!” she whispered conspiratorially, as if it was a scandalous secret. The children giggled at the thought. Madam Chang peered at the laughing Orochimaru, her dark eyes sentimental. “Oh, Potter, you’ve got your father’s looks, but you have your mother’s eyes.”

“Really?” Orochimaru whispered softly, reverently, as he looked down at the carpet, blinking back tears. _I never knew what they looked like,_ he realized. His image of his parents were always of the ones from his last life – was his mother’s hair just as unruly in this life as in her last? He didn’t notice Madam Chang’s warm smile thin into a grimace for a moment.

“Yes,” Madam Chang said softly, taking Orochimaru’s hands into her own. He felt her flinch at something, but he didn’t know what – he supposed he always did run colder than most people. “I didn’t know James very well, but by Merlin if you aren’t the spitting image of him. Lily was a year behind me at Hogwarts, but she was a close friend. She always stood up for what she believed was right, and she was the bravest woman I knew, the perfect Gryffindor. Unfortunately, we fell out of contact after I graduated, and then…” she sighed, wiping tears away from her eyes. “But it is good to see her son alive and well.”

“Thank you, Madam Chang,” Orochimaru said, and he felt the tears flowing out of his face unbidden. Cho reached over the books and gave him a hug, and he realized that remembered this hug. It had been from an old friend long ago, better days before their lives went to hell. Orochimaru hugged her back, and he thanked the Sage that he’d met the Changs today. He helped Cho put her books back in her bag, but she held out _Curses and Counter-Curses_ to him.

“Do you want to borrow this? You can give it back when we’re both at Hogwarts,” she said, and Orochimaru beamed at her as he took the book. He waved goodbye to the Changs as they left, and after they did he stared lovingly down at the spellbook. He stayed in the library until closing, and then he went to his training area in the forest and read some more, Pensie at his side to tutor him through the unfamiliar vocabulary. He ended up being late to dinner that night, so Vernon sent him to bed without food, but he didn’t care. Orochimaru spent the rest of the night all but devouring the book, reading passages to the snakes under the cupboard and teaching them the basic magic.

He noticed the cat sitting outside the garden the next morning and gave it a wary glance.

“<She’s watching you, Young Lord>,” one of the garden snakes lazing in his hair whispered.

“<I don’t mind>,” he hissed back, and the cat jumped down from the rope fence and ran away. _What was that about?_

“You’re certain it was Parseltongue?” Dumbledore asked McGonagall. His hands were clasped in front of him on this desk, his fingers interlaced and shaking ever so slightly, like he was praying for something.

“Absolutely. Albus, do you think he’s the seventh?” Dumbledore’s prayer went unanswered; he nodded and McGongall choked back a cry of horror. 

\---

When Orochimaru was nine, he was ready to run away to Hogwarts and stow away until he got his letter.

Dudley was getting truly intolerable. He would stomp on the stairs above his cupboard every morning, slam him into walls and doors, steal his food, steal his supplies, and never leave him alone at school. His aunt and uncle never disciplined their Dudleykins, and neither did the teachers, and it was always _Potter’s_ fault that someone was up in a tree, or on top of the roof, or had their face shoved into their lunch, or brought a bunch of poisonous snakes into the classroom – actually that last one was actually Orochimaru’s doing. He’d done it because he was bored and wanted to see what would happen, so he did. No one could prove it was him, but the unspoken rule was that if anything strange happened at school, it was _weird Potter, delinquent Potter, troubled Potter, orphan being raised by his relatives, too smart from his own good_ –

It hurt. It still hurt after all this time, to not be able to say anything back without inviting more pain. He didn’t cry over it, didn’t bother to try to fit in – he was Orochimaru and the world was just going to have to accept him for who he was. Pain was pain though, even if it felt more like a bug bite than a knife to the chest every day.

Orochimaru knew there were more people like Cho and Madam Chang out there - _there must be_ , he thought - but they weren’t with him yet, and he was still so lonely. He had Pensie, Natha, Blanche and Noire, and all the snakes of Little Whinging to talk to, but Sage he would’ve killed for another witch or wizard to be his friend. 

One night, his mind so insistent on torturing itself with constant reminders of how lonely he was, he sent some of his magic through a blood bond that he had thought broken upon his death. The bond was as strong as it had ever been though, and the White Snake Sage heard her little clan heir reborn.

 _We have been waiting for you, Orochimaru,_ she said to him, pushing her message through the bond with her chakra, and Orochimaru would never forget the White Snake Sage’s voice in any lifetime. He almost sobbed at _finally_ hearing a voice from home.

 _Be calm, hatchling. It will be alright. We are all here,_ and tens of voices, familiar and not, whispered through the bond, asking if their Lord Orochimaru was alright, and how was he feeling, and were there any snakes from his new home with him? Orochimaru smile and gently sat up on his bed to stroke the heads of the snakes curled up on his bed. 

_Blanche and Noire are here, they’re two little pythons that accidentally got on a boat to England from France and somehow ended up living in this cupboard. Natha’s green like the Konoha forest, but he’s not as nice as their shinobi, he’s just a cranky old man that likes to read history books. Pensie is an old brown adder, she’s gigantic but she’s very sweet, and she tells me lots of stories and teaches me magic._

_Then you are in good company, hatchling_ , the White Snake Sage decreed, _What is your new land like? My bones are stiff and I haven’t seen much of the outside world with my own eyes for so many centuries._

So Orochimaru told her about witches and wizards and the magical world at large (or so he had heard), and the snakes were sympathetic to them, but were annoyed that they were still seen as evil in a different land. He told them about his life with the Dursleys, and one voice in his head was so irate about his treatment that he promised to research a transportation spell to get to Orochimaru’s world and teach them the meaning of fear ( _Orochimaru, you have my express permission to kill your caretakers_ , Kabuto told him, and he had almost laughed out loud). He told them about the transformation of magic to chakra, and the clone-children of his village were fascinated by this new discovery and wondered what humans were like before Kaguya. He told them about his boring Muggle school, how the First Wizarding War began and end, how some Muggle technology far surpassed anything he’d seen in his first life., and all the snakes and humans directly tied to Ryuuchi Cave listened as their prodigal child reborn told them of a magical place with horseless carriages, giant metal birds that transported thousands, if not millions of people around the globe every day, and a land free of the tragedy of a God Tree. 

When Orochimaru grew tired from pouring his magic into the bond – and it took everything he had to talk to all of them at the same time - the White Snake Sage asked him one final question.

_Orochimaru, do you feel the warmth in our bond?_

He nodded, even though only his four sleeping cupboard snakes could see him. He felt the adoration of the snakes at the Sage of the Six Paths’ miracle; the joy of the clone-children of being able to talk to their parent again or even for the first time, because apparently Log had continued his work well after he had died; the wonder of Kabuto, an old man now, equal parts amazed at the full reincarnation of his old lord’s soul and furious at the Dursleys.

 _We may not be with you now_ , the White Snake Sage said _, but you know that we are bound to you by blood. We are the snakes, your clan, and if nothing else, we will always be there for you._

Orochimaru nodded sleepily, exhausted from maintaining the connection. He bade the Sage and his clan good night, and he passed out on the bed. 

The next night, just before he went to bed, Pensie asked if he wanted to hear a story.

“<Aren’t I a little old for bedtime stories?>” he asked.

“<Nonsense, you’re still a hatchling. Besides, it’s one I haven’t told you yet. It’s the tale of our last Snake Sage, over a millennium ago.>”

This got Orochimaru’s attention, and he lied down and listened to Pensie’s tale as she curled around his head, whispering into his ear.

_Our last Sage lived many centuries ago. The Sage hatched from a snake’s egg, as is typical when the previous Sage dies without any living heirs to their magic. She ran wild in the fen, living by the lawlessness of the wild magic. She did not live with other witches and wizards, for they could not understand her wild ways, and they shunned snakes as symbols of Dark Magic. There were several families who were friendly to the snakes though, and in time she took a husband from one of those families, a man of the House of Slytherin. They had a single child together, Salazar Slytherin, who would become one of the greatest wizards in all of Wizarding history._

_However, Salazar was prejudiced. He came to believe that witches and wizards of “pure” blood were superior, and the Sage was distraught at her son’s prejudice. The witch hunts had traumatized and scarred many wizards and witches, and such ideology was becoming more common to protect their own kind, but the Sage knew that ignorance and greed were at the heart of the slaughters. She feared that those same emotions were at the core of her son’s views, and she did not want him to make the same mistake as their persecutors. For many years she fought with her son, trying to convince him that a path of hate could never bring peace, but to no avail. He eventually challenged her to a duel._

_The Sage could not bear to harm her own child, but when her son threw all the spells she had taught him back at her, she fought twice as well and wept through it all. After a great and protracted battle, master witch versus master wizard, the Sage prevailed, disarming her son. He accepted his loss and left their dueling grounds without a word._

_Later that very night, a Muggle assassin poisoned her meal with her husband, but his poison was too weak for one as venomous as the Sage, and the Lord Slytherin caught his wife’s would-be murderer soon after. When she looked at the Muggle’s memories and found that her son had paid him to have her killed, she was furious at her son’s betrayal. She banished the house of Slytherin from the clan of the snakes. Since then, all who are descended from Slytherin have the mark of banishment embedded in their magic and are forbidden from becoming the Sage. In her grief of disowning her own husband and child, she fled into the fen. The Sage was never to be seen again, and a new Sage has not been seen since._

_Some say that the Sage still lives, hiding in the fen, protecting the magic from going to her family until their line runs out. Others say that the Sage died, but her magic is in limbo, unable to pass on to her disgraced heirs. Others still say that she left a way around this limbo; as she disappeared from the world she dropped her cloak in the fen, and the one who finds it will gain her power and become the next Sage._

“<Am I the next Sage?>” Orochimaru asked. Pensie looked at him thoughtfully.

“<Not now, hatchling, but maybe you’ll grow into it.>”

\---

The summer of his tenth year, Orochimaru got his Hogwarts letter in the post. He handed his uncle the bills and Dudley his birthday cards, but he kept the envelope addressed to his cupboard for himself.

“Harry’s got a letter! Why’s Harry got a letter?” Dudley yelled, but Orochimaru rolled his eyes and opened the envelope with trembling hands.

\---

HOGWARTS SCHOOL _of_ WITCHCRAFT _and_ WIZARDRY  
  


Headmaster: Albus Dumbledore

_(Order of Merlin, First Class, Grand Sorc., Chf. Warlock,  
Supreme Mugwump, International Confed. of Wizards)_

Dear Mr. Potter,

We are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Please find enclosed a list of all necessary books and equipment.

Term begins on 1 September. We await your owl by no later than 31 July.

Yours sincerely,

Minerva McGonagall

Deputy Headmistress

\---

“Give it to me!” Dudley yelled, but Harry swatted him away without looking up from the letter. It was here, his letter from Hogwarts, his ticket out of here.

“Aunt Petunia, Uncle Vernon, I got my acceptance letter from Hogwarts,” he said, and the kitchen went silent save for the sizzling of bacon. His aunt turned towards him from the stove, a scowl made sharper by her red lipstick, but she nodded without saying a word, but she froze just as his uncle scoffed at the announcement.

“No one in my family will have anything to do with this magic nonsense,” he said, not looking up from the paper.

“We’re not family.”

Uncle Vernon slammed down the paper onto the table. Dudley’s plate of beans flew into the air and crashed onto the floor, plate shattering into shards. Dudley himself gawked at Orochimaru, wide eyes going back and forth between his cousin and his father.

“You want to repeat that, boy?” Vernon growled at Orochimaru, his face a putrid red.

“Was I supposed to think that we were family?” the boy asked with the same tone one asks why the sky is blue, “Aren’t I your freak of a burden? You and Dudley are always pushing me around, trying to starve me, take away my things, and Aunt Petunia barely does anything to stop you. All because you hate me and my magic. I thought you’d be happier with me out of here for most of the year.”

Vernon’s head went from red to purple, and Orochimaru walked around the table, his back towards a kitchen counter.

“Sit **down** , boy, so I can teach you your manners!” Vernon roared.

“I’m busy, Uncle, I’ve got to send them a reply. By the way, do you have an owl – “

Vernon shot up from his seat with an “insolent brat!” on his tongue and charged at him, but to Orochimaru’s eyes he may as well have been moving through molasses. In an instant, just before Vernon could grab him, Orochimaru dragged one of the white dining chairs in front of himself and leapt backwards onto the kitchen counter, startling his aunt. Vernon dove into the chair, tripping over one of its legs and falling forward, breaking his fall with his left arm. There was a crisp ‘snap’ as the bone broke, and Vernon groaned in pain on the floor.

Orochimaru stepped off the counter, away from Vernon. Aunt Petunia was right behind him, clutching her spatula to her chest, but Orochimaru didn’t move to attack, just turned around and looked her in the eyes. She wanted him to have a murderous face, an angry face, so she could justify doing – she didn’t know what, but – instead he just looked…bored. Resigned, in fact, to some outcome that she hadn’t known existed, but at that moment she felt that this was the end of something she had barely known even started.

“I’ll see you next summer,” Orochimaru said, and he took a few pieces of bacon from the pan, munching on them as he walked over Vernon and out of the room, scanning through his letter again with a smile on his face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Seriously though, 1 chapter/month at best.
> 
> Edit Feb 6, 2021: If you're wondering why Dumbledore can understand Parseltongue, check out this comment thread: https://archiveofourown.org/comments/357403312


	3. Chapter 3

Orochimaru was ecstatic as he shot through the hallway and nearly tore the cupboard door off its hinges. He dove towards his backpack – another sweaty, tattered hand-me-down of black scrap fabric from Dudley – on the ground by his worn wooden bed and all but tore it upon in search of a sheet of paper and a pen. He tossed the acceptance letter on his bed, on top of a dozing Blanche and Noire, curled in two tiny, scaly balls. The pair of snakes hissed in annoyance, but Orochimaru rolled his eyes.

“<Is that your Hogwarts letter, hatchling?>” Pensie asked as she slithered down from the top of one of the wooden shelves under the stairs and onto Orochimaru’s shoulders. He nodded quickly as he tore out a sheet of notebook paper and jotted down his reply so fast it was almost illegible.

\---

Deputy Headmaster McGonagall,

I accept your offer of admission into Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

Yours sincerely,

Harry James Potter

\---

“<Shtampsh?>” Natha asked, slithering across the bed with a small sheet of stamps and a letter envelope in his mouth – Orochimaru had swiped them from Vernon’s mail stash years ago for this exact moment. The boy’s grin widened as Natha dropped the supplies in his outstretched hand, and Orochimaru was vibrating with glee as he put the letter into the envelope.

“<Does Hogwarts even have a street address?>” he asked when he flipped the envelope over

Pensie shook her head. “<No need. All postboxes in Britain are enchanted to send any Hogwarts correspondence straight to the castle.>”

“<That must be complicated, having to sort through all the mail that goes into those boxes. How does that work?>” 

“<It searches for the good faith intent of the letter writer, hatchling. Magic relies a lot more on emotion than your jutsus do>,” she said, “<Don’t go stealing a postbox to study the enchantment. I know the charm is documented in one of your textbooks.>”

Orochimaru looked at the old snake and pouted. _Disappearing a postbox would’ve been fun_ , he thought.

“<Young Lord got caught>,” Noire sang, and Blanche cackled.

“<I would never destroy public property>,” Orochimaru lied perfectly. He threw the letter back into his bag, and scrambled around the cupboard, grabbing his belongings: the few sets of Dudley’s hand-me-downs that made up his whole wardrobe, underwear, and socks; his favorite (stolen) knives he’d smuggled into the house at the end of the last school year; a few packets of non-perishable snacks, also stolen from either the pantry or his classmates; a dusty white mini umbrella with the Grunnings logo, two of its aluminum spines snapped in half; the cash he’d picked out of the family laundry, spare change forgotten in pockets; and Cho Chang’s copy of _Curses and Counter-Curses_ , pages worn with use. The little knickknacks the snakes had given him over the years would have to stay in the cupboard; the pond stones, dried flowers, and animal bones would just get crushed in travel. 

_Of course, I can just steal things as I go, too,_ Orochimaru thought with a snort. He hadn’t survived as a missing-nin as long as he had by _paying_ for everything. He picked up the backpack, letting Pensie slither back down onto the bed before he slung it over one shoulder. Blanche and Noire looked up at Orochimaru in confusion.

“<Young Lord, are you leaving for Hogwarts now?>” Blanche asked.

“<I have to go to Diagon Alley first to get my supplies, but yes, I’m leaving now - >”

Blanche and Noire lunged at him, twin spirals of black and white scales. He let them wrap their bodies around his arms, but he hissed in pain as they coiled tighter.

“<And you didn’t give us any time to send you off? Where are your manners?>” Blanche cried in his face.

“<You’re mean, Young Lord!>” Noire wailed, but Orochimaru rolled his eyes again.

“<You know, once upon a time I was the meanest – ow, ow, ow!>,” he said as the two pythons tightened their grips on his arms even more. He sighed and sat down on the bed, letting Pensie and Natha slither onto his backpack. “<I’m sorry, Blanche, Noire. I didn’t mean to be leaving so suddenly. I made a scene and I probably won’t be able to come back until next summer>.” 

The two pythons loosened their grip on Orochimaru’s arms, and in the silence they all could hear Petunia Dursley gently coaxing her husband to the front door, his moans of pain muffled slightly by the wooden cupboard door. Natha snorted with what Orochimaru thought was pride.

“<Sounds like he finally got what was coming to him>,” the green snake sneered, “<Let the Young Lord go, you two. The sooner he gets away from the Dursleys, the better.>” 

The two pythons uncoiled themselves from Orochimaru’s arms and smoothly slithered up them, taking up what little space was left on his shoulders. They pressed their faces into his cheeks, and in return he moved his head side to side a little, nudging them playfully. Orochimaru smiled at their delighted hisses.

“<Have fun at school, and make sure to write us lots>,” Blanche hissed.

“<You don’t know how to write though>,” Orochimaru said incredulously, and the white snake stuck up his snout.

“<I know what I said>,” he proclaimed; Noire scoffed at her brother.

“<Will you go to Diagon Alley alone, Young Lord?>” the black python asked, but Pensie slithered onto Orochimaru’s head and looked down at the younger snake, shaking her head.

“<Natha and the Young Lord agreed that I would go with him for his first trip to Diagon Alley>,” she said, and Orochimaru momentarily recalled several days in the forest with Pensie and Natha planning his route to Charing Cross, how he was going to avoid attention in Diagon Alley and the greater Wizarding world, whether or not he had any Wizarding money (based on what Natha had told him about the Potters, that was a solid “yes”), and what shops to visit, provided they were still in business. It only made him more frantic to get to that fantastic wonderland. 

The distant rumbling of the Dursley’s station wagon’s engine snapped Orochimaru out of his daydream.

“<I think it’s time I headed out before I get locked in the house>,” Orochimaru said, and the twin pythons and Natha slid back down to the bed. Pensie tugged open the top of his backpack’s zipper with her mouth and slid through the hole; the bag sank on his back with her weight.

“<Have fun at Hogwarts!>” the pythons chorused, and Natha bowed his head at Orochimaru.

“<We shall await your return, my lord Orochimaru>,” Natha said. Orochimaru waved at his snakes as he left his cupboard and closed the door behind him. _I’m going to miss them_ , he thought as he walked out the open front door to 4 Privet Drive. Aunt Petunia, still in her kitchen apron and slippers, was all but pushing a bawling Dudley into the back of the Vauxhall. Vernon was in the passenger seat, passed out from the pain. Orochimaru clapped his hands twice, a smooth smile on his face, and his aunt turned to him. Her hair was all over the place, sweat dripping down her face from the summer heat and physical exertion of the past few minutes, and she glared at him.

“Leaving for the term. Be back next summer,” he said cheerfully as he walked past the unhappy family. Dudley had stopped crying to stare at him, and Petunia took the opportunity to push her son into the backseat of the car and close the door. She looked back at Orochimaru, more panicked than angry now.

“How did you know about her school?” she yelled at him, but Orochimaru’s gleeful smile only widened, and he walked away from the house, down the road, and out of town.

\---

No one noticed the man who stepped off the bus at Charing Cross Road. Short, choppy, chestnut hair, wearing a Manchester t-shirt and ripped jeans, well-worn backpack slung on one shoulder, still sporting a few spots on his freckled face – just another uni student in London for break, dime a dozen. There were at least five other men on the bus just like him.

The man walked down the busy street, jostling no one, turning no heads. He looked straight ahead, neither up at the sky nor down at the pavement nor at his reflection in the various storefronts. The man walked with the crowd for a few blocks, and no one noticed as he smoothly broke from the crowd and stepped into the dilapidated entrance of the empty Leaky Cauldron.

On the other side of the door though, where many saw an abandoned building, the man saw a bustling tavern full of witches and wizards in long robes, freely waving their wands and channeling magic to levitate pints and toss snacks across their tables. Here he looked like the odd one out, but it was not uncommon for visitors who used the Muggle-facing entrance to be in disguise, so no one gave him a second glance as he walked past all the tables and into a dark hallway, towards a covered courtyard.

The man who walked into the hallway disappeared in a puff of smoke, and Orochimaru walked out the other end of the hallway into the courtyard. The top of his backpack nudged itself open, and Pensie stuck her head out of the bag.

“<Most wizards can detect magical disguises except Polyjuice. That jutsu is very useful>,” Pensie hissed into his ear, but Orochimaru shrugged.

“<I don’t think it’s anything special if half of them were intoxicated>,” he snorted as he took his broken umbrella out of a side pocket of his bag and raised it to the brick wall in front of him. He tapped a few bricks on the wall at Pensie’s directions, and the bricks began to move on their own, shifting away and rotating on invisible axes to open the entrance to Diagon Alley. 

Orochimaru gazed at the magical avenue with wonder in his wide eyes. He could feel the magic concentrated in the narrow streets, heavy and powerful, but not suffocating – like being in a shinobi village again, but with far less of the feeling of walking on pins and knives all the time. Witches and wizards in all sorts of fashions meandered about, in robes of all colors and textures and enchanted patterns. The crowds were almost deafening loud to him, but it was a busy, cheerful noise of family conversation and merchants peddling their ware. In the skies above, owls flew around with packages or letters tied to their ankles, ducking in and out of windows in the towering wooden and brick buildings that lined the streets. And the _smell_ – someone was grilling a lot of fish and Orochimaru’s mouth watered.

“<Remember what I said about Parseltongue>,” Pensie reminded him. He nodded, but he wasn’t happy about it; Pensie had told him all the reasons why “good” wizards avoided the snakes, but Orochimaru had rolled his eyes at them. _Humans always became stupid with fear when it came to snakes._

“<I’m walking out>,” he whispered, and Pensie ducked back into the bag as Orochimaru stepped into the street, the brick entrance closing behind him. He joined the flow of the crowd, his eyes wandering up and around and down at everything – a candy store that sold moving chocolate animals (he chuckled at the dislay of chocolate frogs – Jiraiya would’ve had an aneurysm if he’d been able to see this); small stands selling magical trinkets that snarked back at their prospective buyers; clothing boutiques with dresses that had patterns of stars that moved as if the night sky were stitched into the fabric; countless stalls selling pastries and grilled meat; a particularly enticing bookshop with a…cage of living books? Orochimaru stopped and stared at the man behind the window who was picking the books out with a pair of tongs over a meter long, trying to catch one of the gray furry books that were snapping their covers like jaws. A few teenagers in dark robes accented with patches of red, blue, and yellow looked on with concern. _I hope that’s one of my textbooks_ , Orochimaru thought with dark glee as he continued down the street, following the signs to Gringotts.

 _Well…this inspires confidence_ , he thought as he approached the bank and its seemingly hazardous architecture. The interior of the bank looked far more structurally sound though, and he gave an internal sigh of relief as he walked through the entrance, mixing among the steady trickle of wizards on their own business with the bank. A long hallway of polished black and white marble tile led them to a lobby lit with several grand golden chandeliers. A row of dark wooden counters, all at least several meters tall, loomed over Orochimaru’s head; several short humanoid creatures with long ears and wispy hair, dressed in fine tuxedos, peered down at their wizarding clients. _Goblin_ , his mind supplied, recalling Pensie’s description of the great wizarding bank. 

He walked down the hall and came to the only empty bench at the end of the row; an elderly goblin, far older than his colleagues, waved his hands and commanded tens of quills to write on scrolls of parchment without sparing a glance to Orochimaru.

“Welcome to Gringotts Wizarding Bank. What services do you require?” the goblin asked.

“My name is Harry Potter. I would like to make a withdrawal from my family’s vault,” Orochimaru said, and the quills around the goblins scratched to a halt. The lobby was deathly silent as the goblins peered down the row at Orochimaru, as did the wizards who gawked at him. His face remained impassive; _am I really that famous?_ he thought with a touch of incredulity. His teller rose from his seat and leaned over to stare at him closely, and he stared right back with a mixture of boredom and annoyance. The goblin smiled warmly, sharp teeth and all, and leaned back in his seat.

“We’ve been expecting you, Mr. Potter. If you would follow one of my associates to your vault,” he said, and another goblin stepped out from behind the bench and beckoned Orochimaru towards him. The boy followed, ignoring the hushed whispers of the wizards behind him, and several sets of footsteps running out of the lobby.

The pair walked through the golden and marble hallways, winding their way through the maze of a bank, but the entrance to the vault itself was undecorated and looked closer to a repurposed coal mine. His goblin escort – Griphook, the goblin had told him – pulled a lever by a set of tracks and turned back towards Orochimaru.

“Mr. Potter, the bank’s policy is that when a client is in the vault, all the client’s sentient companions must be observed at all times by an employee of the bank. Please ask your companion to make themselves visible at this time.”

Orochimaru’s eyebrows rose a bit, but he set his bag down anyways. _Wonder how they found out_ , he thought as he opened the bag and offered a hand to Pensie. “Sorry, you’ll have to come out for this bit.” 

“<I suspected as much>,” she hissed, poking her head out of the bag, and Orochimaru caught Griphook flinching slightly out of the corner of his eye. The snake slithered out of the bag and immediately curled herself around Orochimaru’s hand, slithering her way up his arm and up his neck. She settled most of her body mass loosely around his neck and rested her head on top of Orochimaru’s with a content hiss. Orochimaru glanced at Griphook; the goblin was uneasy – _stress in his eyebrows, more fidgeting, he is afraid_ \- but Griphook quickly schooled his expression and body language back to stoicism. _Professional_ , Orochimaru thought, _good._

“Good afternoon, Madam Snake,” the goblin said with a bow, and Pensie bowed her head in return.

“<Please tell Mr. Griphook that I wish him the same, and that he may call me Pensie>,” she said, and as Orochimaru relayed the message, he saw another flash of shock in Griphook’s eyes, but the goblin tucked it away just as fast. A mining cart soon came rumbling up the tracks, and Orochimaru and Griphook climbed in, descending into the dark caverns of the Gringotts vault.

The cool, dry air of the vault was a welcome respite from the summer heat, and all three silently sighed in relief. Orochimaru’s eyes adjusted to the darkness of the dimly-lit caverns, but he could hear other carts going up and down in the tunnels around them. Their own cart zoomed past another one ascending back to the surface, carrying a goblin and the largest man Orochimaru had ever seen. They had gone fast, but he could tell the man wore a large woolen overcoat and had been carrying a pink umbrella, of all things. He set that thought aside though as his cart kept on descending into the ground, until they slowly came to a stop in front of Vault 687. 

Griphook and Orochimaru got out of the cart and walked up to the vault door, an iron wall with a single key hole. Griphook took out a small golden key and handed it to Orochimaru.

“Whenever you are ready, Mr. Potter,” he said, and Orochimaru gingerly took the delicate key. He pushed the key into the keyhole and twisted. There was a sharp “click”, and he easily pulled the door open, revealing his family’s fortune. What lay before him in the stone vault was a great mound of coins of all sorts of metals, and he couldn’t stop himself from staring at it all in surprise. 

_I had this kind of money the whole time?_ he thought with no small amount of surprise. Even when he was Otokage, he never had money like this. This was the kind of wealth that he expected from a _daimyo_.

“Um…Griphook, how much is a Galleon in pounds?” he asked with a shaky voice.

“One Galleon is £5.”

“Right. Okay,” he said, walking into the vault and picking a gold coin with slightly shaking hands. The image of a dragon’s head was carved into its surface; “unum galleon”, it read on the top edge. _There must be at least hundreds of thousands of these coins in here_ , he thought lightheadedly. _I don’t have to rely on the Dursleys any more._

“<Are you alright, hatchling?>” Pensie asked with worry, sliding down Orochimaru’s head and nudging at his face.

“<Yeah, I’m…I’m fine>,” he whispered, “<How much do you think I need to live here for a month?>”

“<At least 300 Galleons for a month at an inn and at least 50 for your school supplies. You can always come back and get more. I don’t think you’re going to run out of money any time soon unless you’re trying to buy land>.” Orochimaru nodded, mouth dry. He took off his backpack and opened it and shoved a small pile of gold coins into his bag, feeling a little bit like a cat burglar.

His head was still spinning a bit when he closed his vault behind him. The tunnels darkened, no longer lit by the glowing gold of his money, and he and Griphook got back into the mine cart and drove back up to the surface. His bag _jingled_ with coin whenever the cart hit a small bump, and Orochimaru’s face flushed. However, when they returned to the surface, he frowned at the goblins that were waiting for them, including the teller he spoke to. They all blinked once with shock when they saw Pensie riding atop Orochimaru’s head, but just like Griphook professionalism came first.

“Head Goblin, is something the matter?” Griphook asked as he brought the mine cart to a stop. The teller sighed and looked up to Orochimaru, hands clasped behind his back.

“Mr. Potter, we at Gringotts aim to provide a crucial service for the Wizarding community,” he said, “Your reputation precedes you though, and there is now…a commotion outside the doors of our bank now that news of your return has started spreading outside.”

 _How annoying_ , Orochimaru thought. His face must have betrayed his thoughts, because one of the goblins shook her head in sympathy.

“We thought it best to warn you,” the Head Goblin said.

 _“Thanks, but you’re on your own.” I suppose that’s fair._ Orochimaru sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose.

“Have the other customers been able to leave the bank freely?” he asked, and the goblins nodded. Orochimaru smiled – _that makes this easy then_. He twisted the magic through his body, drawing it over his skin and molding it into a henge. In a puff of smoke, a tall, blonde woman in fine forest green robes over a silver blouse and dark pants replaced the scrawny boy. The black backpack was now a worn brown leather messenger back slung across her body, and Pensie slithered down from the woman’s shoulders and into the bag. Right at the center of the new woman’s forehead was a small purple diamond, and Orochimaru hoped that Tsunade didn’t have a famous body double in this world. The goblins stepped back, and he heard one of them whisper to another in an unfamiliar language.

“Think this’ll do the trick?” he asked with Tsunade’s voice, a cocky grin stretch across his face. The Head Goblin looked up at the woman, smiling very slightly.

“Very much so, ma’am. Thank you for banking with Gringotts. Greta, please escort the customer back to the lobby.”

The goblins filtered back into the bank as if nothing had happened, and the fake Tsunade walked out the bank to a huge crowd of people swarming around the entrance, physically being held back by burly wizards and witches in red Auror uniforms. _Better get out of here, don’t want to get caught in a stampede._

“Excuse me, ma’am! Marina McMahon, Daily Prophet!” a short woman yelled at her through the din, waving a press pass in one hand and clutching a quill and parchment in the other, “Did you see Harry Potter in the bank?”

Orochimaru-as-Tsunade shook his head and walked past her, pushing his way past the Aurors and into the mob, her ears ringing with cries of “The Boy Who Lived!”. The crowd only surged forward though; for every step he took, it felt like he was being pushed back two. Finally, he’d had enough, and with a loud snarl he launched himself over the crowd and onto the side of a building, startling a man in his pyjamas staring out from his third floor balcony. He ignored him as he vaulted himself onto the roof of the building and looked down at the crowd.

“They get like this when a celebrity goes to a bank? Pathetic,” Orochimaru hissed. He jumped from roof to roof, until he was in the South Side of Diagon. He peered down to the street below – light traffic, most of the wizards were in fancier robes, and best of all, there was an empty alleyway free of too much garbage right next to him. He stepped off the edge of the roof, landing gracefully in the dark alleyway with a soft “thump”. Brushing off dirt from his robes, he looked at either end of the alley, and saw a small face at the end of the alleyway staring at him. The child quickly looked away from him, and Orochimaru groaned internally. _Sage, that was a rookie mistake,_ he chided himself, _I’m out of practice._

He walked out of the alley back into the quiet streets of Diagon South, and the child he had seen was on his right, staring up at him. He had a narrow face with pale eyes and slicked back blond hair and was dressed in a finer suit than even many of the other wizards in the crowd. The boy eyed him with unmasked suspicion, and Orochimaru sighed loudly, like Tsunade would when they were chunin and some drunk civilian guy in a bar would try to dare her into an arm wrestling match.

“What do you want, kid?” fake Tsunade asked, but the boy shook his head.

“No, I thought you looked like my aunt, but she would never talk to me like that. Or jump off a building,” the boy scoffed.

“When there’s a mob outside the bank, you take any escape you can get.”

“There’s a mob? Why? I did think Diagon was rather empty today,” the boy said, looking up and down the street.

“Someone saw Harry Potter at the bank and then everyone and their mother decided to go look for him,” Orochimaru spat, but the boy looked at him in amazement.

“Really? Did you see him? What did he look like?” the boy asked with wide eyes, but he quickly schooled his face into something like disinterest, “I mean, I don’t really care, Father says that it’s all silly hero worship, and I agree.”

 _Great, a rich little daddy’s son_. _I **love** to deal with those_, Orochimaru groaned in his mind, but he would’ve been blind if he’d missed the honest wonder in the boy’s voice. It was interesting that this boy’s father wasn’t obsessed with Harry Potter either – the snakes had made it very clear that people tended not to like Harry Potter if they had liked the man he had inadvertently defeated. Orochimaru knelt down, matching his height with that of this boy.

“Between you and me, yeah, I did. He left Gringotts long before that crowd start gathering, so don’t bother looking for him there. Didn’t get a good look at him, but I think he was in Muggle clothes. Scrawny little thing really, I don’t think he’s eating right.” The boy frowned when Orochimaru mentioned Muggles.

“So it’s true that he was living with Muggles…” the boy said with a tone that was a little too condescending for Orochimaru’s taste, even if they were talking about the Dursleys in a roundabout way. 

“Does that matter?”

“Father says that I shouldn’t say things like this in public, but you look like someone I can trust,” and the boy beckoned Orochimaru to turn his ear towards him, “Don’t you think it would’ve been better for him to be raised by wizards?”

“I don’t know anything about his family situation, and I don’t want to speculate on what would be better for him or not,” Orochimaru said evenly, “You look like you’re about his age though, so you’ll probably meet him at Hogwarts. Ask him about his home life then.”

“Not likely,” the boy said with a slight pout, “Father says his parents were Gryffindors, which means he’ll probably be one too, and I’m definitely going into Slytherin.” _Right, the house system_ , Orochimaru remembered. He always did think it was a little silly, but if he had to guess where he’d end up…

The woman who looked like Tsunade chuckled, and the boy scrunched his eyebrows in confusion. “What’s so funny?”

“No, I don’t think he’ll go to Gryffindor. I think it’s a 50/50 shot between Ravenclaw and Slytherin, actually,” Orochimaru said with a knowing smile as he stood up to his full height and started walking away.

“How do you know that?” the boy shouted at Orochimaru’s receding back, but he only waved a hand in farewell and turned the corner, disappearing into the crowd of shoppers.

\---

Orochimaru dropped the henge when he returned to the Cauldron’s courtyard, a small stack of books and most of his school supplies shrunk and stuffed in the bag under a sleeping Pensie. It was nearing dinnertime and keeping up a henge the way he did took a lot of energy; he was ready to lie down and not get up for a solid 12 hours. He walked back into the inn, avoiding the patrons – he saw the huge man again, talking quietly with a slightly trembling regularly-sized man in a purple turban – and headed to the bar, waving down the bartender.

“And what can I do, young man?” the bartender – Tom, he’d heard from the other patrons - asked.

“Do you have any rooms free for a month?” Tom’s eyebrows rose, and he scanned the bar – _looking for my parents, probably_ , Orochimaru knew with some annoyance.

“Well, yes, we’ve got a few – most people don’t reserve rooms for that long here at the Leaky Cauldron, you know. 10 Galleons per day for a single, 15 for a double, breakfast included - say, could you point out your guardian to me, young man, so I can talk to them about payment?”

“I am unaccompanied, and I am seeking lodgings for myself,” he said, careful to filter out his irritation – yes, he was a child, but right now he just wanted to get dinner and lay down somewhere. His back had been aching for a while, and the sooner he unloaded his stuff somewhere, the better.

“I…see,” Tom said hesitantly, “Well, I’ve got a single on the third floor that’s open, good view of Diagon too. I’ll take you to the register so I can get you checked in, Mr….?”

Orochimaru sighed dramatically (in his mind), set his bag on a barstool and dug around for a pen in the front pocket. He pulled out a pen and a small notepad, wrote down a name, and handed it to Tom. His eyes widened as he read the name, but when he looked back to Orochimaru, the boy had put a finger to his lips.

“It’s pronounced ‘Evans’, sir,” he said with a smile, and the man nodded and beckoned him to a counter at the entrance of the bar to check Orochimaru in. The boy followed, his bag jingling slightly.

The next morning, Orochimaru went out in disguise again – Tsunade again, but in the nicer wizarding robes he’d bought for himself yesterday (a beautiful deep purple, with a silver tunic underneath). He had some coins jingling in his pockets, the rest of his belongings in his room guarded by Pensie. Tom hadn’t been wrong about the view – he could look down the entrance of Diagon from his window, and he had spent yesterday afternoon asking Pensie about the shops he had skipped.

He wandered through the less packed streets, winding through the crowds of wizards haggling with street vendors and commuters heading to work. Moving south, he soon came to the twin glass displays that marked Ollivanders, the famed wand shop.

(“<Some would say that you’re not a proper British wizard without your wand>”, Pensie had told him. Orochimaru had scoffed at that, he could do magic just fine without a wand, but Pensie had looked unimpressed at such a proclamation.)

The shop was dark and empty as he dropped the henge and entered, his eyes drawn to the boxes upon boxes stacked in huge shelves all around the room, and he felt a pang of nostalgia for his personal library. Messy to the unobservant eye, but clearly organized in a system logical enough for the archivist. No one was behind the counter, so Orochimaru waited, looking at all the wand boxes on the desk. _Pine with dragon heartstrings, 8 and a half. Sycamore with unicorn hair, 8 and a quarter. Walnut with phoenix feather, 9 and a quarter._

“Can I help you?”

Orochimaru’s head snapped up, but no one was at the counter. Down the hall, a pair of silver eyes shone from the end of a dark hallway, and as they moved closer, the silhouette of an aged man holding several narrow boxes in his arms appeared out of the darkness. He peered at Orochimaru with a curious look.

“Mr. Potter, I presume?” Orochimaru nodded, eyes narrowing, but Ollivander just chuckled. “Don’t worry, I heard what happened at Gringotts yesterday. I have no desire to draw a crowd to my establishment. They come whether I want them to or not. Let’s get started helping your wand find you, shall we?”

He put down the boxes in his arms on top of the counter and wandered around the shop, gaze roving the shelves and muttering to himself. Orochimaru observed him in silence, watching the man pull out boxes, only to shove back with a shake of the head. Finally, Ollivander stopped at a shelf by the front of the shop and pulled out a few boxes. He walked back to Orochimaru and opened one of the boxes.

“Sycamore with dragon heartstring, ten and a tenth inches. Give it a try,” he said, pulling out the wand and handing it to Orochimaru. The boy studied the wand, and he felt the magic try to run through the wand. He pointed the wand at a book on a table.

“Wingardium Leviosa,” he said, and he felt the magic flow, that power to control some unknown force. The book began to levitate, but he frowned at the feeling. It would have been easier to do this without a wand at all. Ollivander hummed thoughtfully and took the wand out of Orochimaru’s hand.

“You already know some spells?” he asked, and Orochimaru nodded again. The wandmaker laughed suddenly, a sharp surprise in the quiet shop. 

“That’ll make this a little less destructive on my poor shop then. You wouldn’t believe the insurance I have to get against some of your fellow classmates’ magic when they get their new wands. Here, try this one. Yew with unicorn tail hair, eleven inches,” he said, holding out the wand to Orochimaru, but just as he touched the wand Ollivander took it back immediately with a muttered, “No, not right at all.”

“Redwood, phoenix feather, twelve inches.” The book levitated a few inches higher than the first wand, but it still felt off to Orochimaru.

“Oak, dragon heartstring, nine and three-tenths. Birch, dragon heartstring, almost eleven. Ash, unicorn tail hair, thirteen and eight-tenths – no, way too long for a child. No, no, no, no, no,” Ollivander muttered, handing Orochimaru wand after wand, sometimes letting him test them, sometimes taking it before he could even grab it. The wandmaker wandered through his shop, pulling wand after wand out and putting back just as many within seconds. Finally though, he took out a black box from the back of his shop, and paused. Orochimaru stood on his toes, trying to get a better look at the wandmaker’s face, but when the man turned back to the front of the store, he could tell the man was pleased. Ollivander brought the single box to the front, opened it, and took out the wand, inspecting it with a hint on nostalgia in his eyes. He handed it the wand to the boy.

“Try this,” he said quietly, and Orochimaru took it. It felt like a knife through the flesh, but instead of bringing pain – the candleflames in the shop grew twice in size, and a wind picked up in the closed shop. The power rushed through his body, warm and familiar, and Orochimaru thought for some reason of _walking through the gates of Otogakure, the two chuunin stationed at the entrance of the suspension bridge spanning the canyon saluting him. A dark home in a forest of bamboo, a pond lit by moonlight, and snakes in the grass. A wooden shack built into the cliffside, a tiny Mitsuki toddling around and playing baby shinobi tag with a teenage Log. A large brick house in a little snowy village, dyed in a warm red._

Ollivander was staring at him with a small smile on his face. “Holly, phoenix feather, eleven exactly. How curious.”

Orochimaru looked up at him. “What do you mean?”

“I remember making this wand almost 70 years ago. The phoenix from whom your wand’s core comes from gave me not one, but two tail feathers to use. That was the one and only time I was given more than one tail feather from a phoenix – and I used those twin tail feathers to make two wands from the same branch of a holly tree. I sold the first wand about 10 years after I made it to a boy who would become the most feared wizard in a century – He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.”

“And I am holding the twin,” Orochimaru almost snarled. He was holding a duplicate of the wand that killed his parents – he knew exactly what kind of things it could do.

“Precisely, but know this: the wand chooses the wizard, but the wizard chooses his spells,” Ollivander said, looking at Orochimaru with some sadness. “His wand and your wand are some of the most powerful I’ve ever made. That man chose to do terrible things with that power, but in some ways, they were great feats of magic too.”

Orochimaru knew that feeling intimately – perhaps too much so. He felt the magic coursing through himself and the wand, the sheer power it could channel, but also hesitation. Guilt, maybe, but also vast pride. _Do not turn away from my power_ , it seemed to say to him, _You know what I can do. We can be the greatest in the world._

The boy nodded. “I will simply be the greater wizard then,” he said with a grin. Ollivander laughed again in surprise, but he had a wide smile on his face as well.

“Let us hope so, Mr. Potter.”

\---

It was another night at the Malfoy Manor, and three little Slytherins-to-be were gossiping about the latest rumor to pop up in their little high society.

“Mum told me Mr. Borgin told her that Snake Boy scared the living daylights out of him by opening up a chest that was supposedly owned by Salazar Slytherin,” Pansy Parkinson told him one afternoon, draped over one of the chairs in the parlor while they waited for their parents to get ready to go out for an evening ball, “She told me that he just started talking to the box, and it talked back to him, and then he _yelled_ at it in Parseltongue, and it just opened like that! Apparently there wasn’t anything worth it inside, but when he yelled he spooked Mr. Borgin so much that he almost made him drop a haunted vase worth over a thousand Galleon!”

Blaise Zabini, who was taking up a whole couch, nodded. “My mum said that Mrs. Nott heard from Mr. Crabbe that he saw Snake Boy walking up and down a wall like it was the ground, talking to his pet snake, which is apparently almost as big as him – and Mr. Crabbe is pretty large, mind you - and when Mr. Crabbe tried to get his attention he Apparated right in front of him and told him to sod off!”

Pansy nodded at that. “I heard from the Carrows that a Flint cousin heard from one of their friends heard from their co-worker that they saw Snake Boy talking to the witch that runs the _Coffin House_ ,” she whispered conspiratorially, and all three of them, Parkinson, Zabini, and Malfoy shuddered in fear – even their parents didn’t go into _that_ store. Necromancy wasn’t for polite company, which meant that Snake Boy was not polite company. He was possibly very Dark company, and that wasn’t in vogue anymore, not since Voldemort’s defeat.

“Has anyone our age actually seen this…Snake Boy?” Draco, who unlike his friends was sat correctly in his armchair, asked with some irritation. He’d been hearing _all_ about Snake Boy for the past month, and he was feeling a little left out from all the fun. A new Parselmouth, with no clear relation to the Slytherin line? That kind of news made _waves_ , but the adults were being rather tightlipped about him. Or at least to Draco – Pansy and Blaise seemed to have no problem getting this gossip. The two of them looked at each other thoughtfully, but it was Blaise that turned to him.

“I think Daphne Greengrass said she met him last week. Said she didn’t really talk to him much, didn’t even get a name out of him. He was completely caught up in some textbook – “

“Oh, _ew_ ,” Draco groaned.

“ – but she said he seemed pretty nice. Apparently he’s tiny, but the snake makes him look a lot more threatening. She said he was just sitting out on a bench reading, so she hung out with him while her mum was shopping. He was asking her basic questions about magic, which she said was weird, because he was dressed in the new line of robes at Twillfitt’s, so he has to have _some_ relation to our society, but I don’t know.”

“Maybe he’s a half-blood but he was raised by Muggles?” Pansy suggested, but Blaise shrugged.

“You know, my mum said that she saw that snake with a woman that looked a lot like your dad, Malfoy,” Blaise said suddenly, and Draco sat up a little straighter, “She says she saw her talking to the snake on the way from Knockturn to Diagon – didn’t get a chance to talk to her you know, but she swore it was your dad’s sister or something.”

“Did she have a purple diamond on her forehead?” Draco asked, frowning. He’d been thinking about what the woman said about Harry Potter not being a Gryffindor; what would the world look like, in the 50% chance that the Boy Who Lived was a Slytherin? Would he be his friend?

“Hm, she didn’t say, why? Do you know her?” Blaise asked, and Pansy looked at Draco curiously. He shook his head though.

“No, but – “

“Children, it’s time to go,” Narcissa Malfoy called from the parlor door, and the three of them groaned as they got up and followed Mrs. Malfoy out. None of the children knew that all their stories were missing one very important fact.

Knockturn Alley had something of an unofficial “what happens in Knockturn, stays in Knockturn” policy when it came to dangerous, illegal, scandalous, or just outright weird things that happened in the shady shopping avenue, so when the children of Knockturn’s patrons heard stories about a young Parselmouth, they never heard that the boy looked an awful lot like James Potter. The boy’s hair was too unruly to see his forehead, but the adults knew the odds were good that it had a scar in the shape of a lightning bolt, and if it really was Harry Potter that was speaking to snakes, that was wandering around dark and dreary places, that was talking to necromancers amicably and walking up and down walls like it was the most normal thing – well.

They weren’t going to say anything.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> good news: I outlined the rest of this story so I'm not writing blind here and I have so many ideas :)  
> bad news: have yet to figure out when exactly I'm going to have the time to write all of it. I'll cross that bridge when I get there.


	4. Chapter 4

King’s Cross was busy as ever the morning of September 1st, but perhaps a bit busier than usual. Orochimaru walked silently with the crowd of tired morning commuters and lively tourist families. He looked up at the trains, watching the people on the other side of the window glass read the paper or catch up on sleep. He dragged his new dragonhide suitcase full of shrunken supplies and half a library behind him, Dudley’s ratty old backpack having long since been thrown into the rubbish bin. Eyes sweeping across the ceiling to the central columns of the station, he mentally counted off the platform numbers. _Five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten…_

Nine and Three-Quarters was the platform he was looking for today though, and if he was going to be honest, it didn’t make much sense. He’d never heard of three-quarters of a platform, and Pensie was not there to guide him.

“<But I want you to come with me>,” he had told her last night, lying on the bed in his room, Pensie curled on the bedside table, but the brown snake had shaken her head.

“<Hatchling, I wish I could, but I must return to Natha and the twins. Make friends with the humans at Hogwarts, okay?>”

“<Fiiiiiine>,” he’d whined, and in the morning, he’d given her his farewells, rubbing the sleep from his eyes as he watched her slither through a hole in the wall and back to Little Whinging. He’d checked out of the Leaky Cauldron, taken a bus to King’s Cross, and now here he was.

Orochimaru stopped right between Platforms Nine and Ten. Whenever he’d asked Pensie to clarify anything about the platform that the Hogwarts Express stopped at, she’d just laughed at him and said it was a surprise. But there was nothing obviously magical about this train station, and he hadn’t seen anyone that was obviously a wizard – _so it’s a hidden entrance_ , he thought. He sighed, walked over to one of the brick columns, and leaned back against a wall that wasn’t there.

He yelped as he stumbled backwards through the barrier and fell on his butt into Platform Nine and Three-Quarters. The crowd of families here with their children and friends was much louder than in Muggle King’s Cross, and no one had noticed him stumble in, nor did they help him as he got up, rubbing his back in pain. He walked towards the black and red Hogwarts Express, an older model than the Muggle trains were, yet gleaming with a fresh coat of paint as if it had just been put on the tracks. 

This was it – he was going to Hogwarts. He was going to learn about magic and this power he had and it was going to be _marvelous_. 

Orochimaru threw his suitcase into the baggage car and wove through the crowd of teenagers in Muggle clothes and wizard robes, hopping onto the first car he saw that looked a little less overcrowded than the rest. He glanced through the compartment windows as he walked through the little hallway in the car – many of the rooms were full of students already, chatting with each other, playing cards, catching up on breakfast, or taking a nap. He peeked into a compartment filled with girls in the blue and bronze accented uniforms of Ravenclaw, and he recognized the witch right in the center of attention. Orochimaru smiled as he walked past Cho Chang’s compartment; he’d have to return that textbook soon.

The next compartment down was empty, save for a boy with messy red hair munching on some cheese, meats, and crackers out of a plastic bag. He was holding out one of the crackers to a rat in his lap, and he looked up when Orochimaru slid the door open.

“Are these seats taken? It’s quite full everywhere else,” Orochimaru asked, and the boy shook his head.

“No, mate, have a seat. Are you a first-year?”

“Yes, I am. What’s your name?” Orochimaru asked as he sat across from the boy. Looking closer, he noticed the boy’s pink face was covered in freckles, and his clothing was worn and just a bit too big for his frame. The boy beamed at him with perfect teeth.

“The name’s Ron Weasley, and this here’s Scabbers,” he said as he picked up the squirming rat, “He’s the family pet rat. And you?”

Orochimaru glanced out the window of the compartment door – no one was hanging around. He looked back to Ron and pushed his bangs away from his face, revealing his lightning bolt scar. He had always hated that part of shinobi life, the physical reminders of being just a hair too slow to react, reminders that it all could’ve ended right then and there. This one, hidden under his dark, choppy hair, was a daily reminder that it had in fact ended for his family at the hands of one wizard, but it was certainly a quick, nonverbal way to communicate his identity.

Ron gaped at him, dropping Scabbers onto his lap.

“Blimey, you’re – “

“Please keep it down,” Orochimaru whispered quickly, smoothing his hair back over his forehead. “I almost got mobbed at Gringotts just for saying my name.”

“I…wow,” Ron gasped, leaning back and staring at the ceiling. “ _The_ Harry Potter. It’s like I’m dreaming or something.”

“I assure you, this is no dream,” Orochimaru chuckled darkly. “Weasley, you say? I’ve read about your family. Your grandmother is rather infamous.”

Ron laughed and shook his head. “You know, that’s usually not what people say when they see one of us, unless they’re as ancient as Grandma. Besides, most folks don’t care about what happened unless they’re one of those posh pureblood families. Why are you reading up on that stuff anyways?”

“Catching up on your history and gossip. I was raised by Muggles,” Orochimaru said. _Good to know who’s who in your society,_ he thought. Ron shook his head again.

“I couldn’t do it. Too much drama over who married who, like one of those Muggle programmes Dad likes to watch. Say, what’s it like? You know, being famous like you?”

“Terribly inconvenient,” Orochimaru sighed dramatically, looking out the train window down at the busy families and students on the other side of the station. “I can’t go anywhere decent without everyone wanting to shake my hand or get my autograph.” _They didn’t seem to care too much in Knockturn, though. That was a nice change of pace._

“Really? I’d like to be popular like that, but I guess I’ll settle for not being the savior of the Wizarding world for now,” Ron shrugged, munching on some cheese. “Hey, do you want to see something cool? I bet you didn’t have one of these lying ‘round the house since you lived with Muggles.”

Orochimaru nodded, and Ron set aside Scabbers and his food, stood up and reached for one of the boxes in the overhead compartment. The dark-haired boy glanced over at the rat nibbling on a stray cracker. It looked up at him and squeaked and ran behind the little pouch of food. Orochimaru snorted at the little rodent’s staring at him fearfully from behind the bag, as if that could possibly protect it. _I suppose it’s technically one of my prey animals,_ he thought, but he’d never had a taste for rats in either life.

Meanwhile, Ron sat back down, a large checkered wooden board on his lap and a small red velvet bag on top. 

“Chess! The Dursleys didn’t own a set, but I’ve always wanted to play,” Orochimaru beamed.

“Really? That’s a shame, I’ll show you the ropes then. I knew Muggles played it but…,” Ron said as he opened the bag, “This is a _Wizard’s_ Chess set.” He poured the chess pieces onto the board; the small red and white ceramic figurines rolled out and started squirming as if alive.

“Soulève-moi! Soulève-moi!” a puny red pawn screeched, waving its sword furiously.

“They talk!” Orochimaru all but squealed in delight, and the pawn rolled around faster in indignance.

“My grandfather’s set – said he got it on a trip to France years ago,” Ron explained as he moved the pieces upright one by one and placed them on the board, red on Orochimaru’s side and white on his own. “The pieces trust me, but they might talk back to you. Should ignore them, honestly, I’ve seen them try to make my siblings throw matches.”

“A battle of wills, then? I accept that challenge,” Orochimaru smiled at the board with an evil glint in his eyes. A little shudder went through the red pieces, the dark intent of their new commander rolling around them. Ron either didn’t notice this or ignored it, because he just moved the board’s edge closest to him to on top of his knees, and Orochimaru put the other edge on top of his own.

“Alright, Harry, so here’s how you play…”

\---

Hermione Granger had boarded the train right before it had left the station, leaving her parents with lots of hugs and assurances that yes, she’ll study lots, but she’ll take care of herself too, and she’ll keep up with her Muggle academics with those books they packed for her and yes, she’ll stay safe, and she’ll remember to write them lots, and –

She was going to miss them, but she was going to learn magic! It was beyond her wildest dreams!

It also meant that she hadn’t found a seat when the train had started moving, and from what she could tell, most of the compartments were packed already. She was walking through the small corridor, several feet behind a blonde girl in a first-year’s uniform when said girl stopped right in front of one of the compartments and gawked at the people inside, before making a mad dash down the car.

“What was that all about?” she asked herself as she peered inside the compartment. There were two boys, one with messy black hair and glasses resting his chin on top of his interlaced fingers, and the other a redhead with a pet rat in his lap, nibbling nervously on a piece of salami. They were locked in what appeared to be an intense game of chess. The red-haired boy moved a white rook in front of a red pawn, and Hermione gasped as the rook piece got up from its chair and swung it around to smash the pawn into pieces.

“That’s just brutal!” she screeched, slamming the compartment door open and startling the redhead. He almost jostled the pieces off the board, but the boy with glasses quickly grabbed the edges of the board and held it steady. They both turned to her with intense stares, and she balked at how tense they seemed. Especially the boy with glasses, he was giving her a very uneasy feeling – something in his stare seemed malicious. It only lasted for a second thought, and the dark feeling quickly melted away.

“It’s Wizard’s Chess, that’s what they’re supposed to do?” the redhead said, mildly confused. The other boy nodded.

“I quite like it. Makes it feel like there are… _stakes_ ,” he said, and the remaining red pieces shivered in their places. Hermione gave him a wary glance – that uneasy feeling was back - and looked back at Ron.

“Well, then, how do you put the pieces back together?” she asked.

“They…put themselves back together on their own?” the redhead said with a shrug.

“They’re enchanted? With what?” Hermione asked again, moving into the compartment and sitting next to the freckled boy. She glanced over to the boy now across from her, who was still staring at her…or rather, at something on her left shoulder. She turned her head, and a small toad on her shoulder looked back at her. It croaked right in her face.

“Well hello, when did you get here?” she whispered, gently picking up the toad. It didn’t squirm at all being handled by her, just closed its eyes and sank into her hand. The dark-haired boy looked down at the toad and back at her again, raising an eyebrow.

“Not yours?” he asked.

“No, I didn’t bring any animals. Sorry, I haven’t introduced myself – Hermione Granger, first-year,” she said, holding out her free hand to the boy. He took it in a firm handshake, his grasp startlingly cold and bony. Hermione worried if he was alright.

“I’m Harry Potter, and this is Ron Weasley. We’re also first-years,” he said with a small smile.

“You’re Harry Potter? The Boy Who Lived?”

Orochimaru’s smile dropped and he sighed. “Yes, that’s me. No pictures, no autographs.”

“No, of course not,” Hermione said quickly, “It’s just that all the books make you out to be some kind of legendary hero, but you’re just…”

“A kid?”

“Well, yes,” she said sheepishly, “Not quite what I had in mind, but I suppose you were only a baby when you defeated You-Know-Who.”

“He’s also about to defeat _me_ in chess. Bloody brilliant, that’s what you are, Harry,” Ron groaned, brushing the pieces of the broken pawn back into the bag.

“Oh, come on now, let’s see what you’ve got,” Hermione proclaimed, leaning towards Ron and eyeing the board. The toad in her hand was completely at ease, and Orochimaru gave her another glance. _It’s just too familiar,_ he thought.

\---

“Snake Boy’s playing chess with a Weasley!” Daphne Greengrass shouted into the compartment of almost-guaranteed Slytherin first-years. Draco was sandwiched between Crabbe and Goyle on one bench, Pansy and Blaise across from them on the other. They all looked up at Daphne in surprise.

“Snake Boy?” Crabbe and Goyle echoed.

“Chess?” Pansy and Blaise parroted.

“Weasley?” Draco scoffed, turning his nose up, “There goes the neighbourhood.”

“I don’t know, I’ve heard the older Weasley children run the Hogwarts Chess Club. He’s probably giving Snake Boy hell,” Blaise said as he moved over to make room for Daphne, “A Weasley’s a Weasley though, can’t do anything about that. What year was this one?”

“First-year,” Daphne said, and all the baby Slytherins groaned.

“Snake Boy’s got his new best friend and he’s going to Gryffindor,” Crabbe whined as Goyle nodded in agreement. Draco leaned back against the wall, his head making a soft ‘thump’ against the cushion.

“Why didn’t _we_ get to Snake Boy first?” he sighed, “Next thing you know, he’ll start hanging around Longbottom.”

“Don’t jinx it,” Pansy said, dry as sandpaper.

Several compartments down, Neville Longbottom found Trevor fast asleep in Hermione’s hands and stayed to watch what was shaping up to be the greatest chess match to ever take place on the Hogwarts Express. The match would last for another hour, followed by another hour of a defeated Orochimaru furiously going over his moves, challenging Ron to a rematch, and losing again. Everyone forgot about lunch, and Orochimaru gained a lifelong friend and chess rival.

\---

The morning passed into afternoon, and the train sped across the land further northward, past miles of pasture and dense woods, tranquil lakes and rivers, until finally it reached Hogsmeade Station just as the sun started to set on the horizon, the air still a tad warm with summer heat. Throngs of children and teenagers disembarked onto the stone platform, grabbing their luggage and heading towards a set of gates leading into a dark forest. A giant of a man in a dirty overcoat holding a iron lantern stood out among the crowd, and his voice bellowed through the chitchat of the hundreds of students around him.

“First-years, this way! First-years, this way!” the man announced, and Orochimaru huddled with Ron, Hermione, and Neville, as they wandered over to the voice. He looked up and realized that he knew this man – he had been at Gringotts the day of the mob, coming up and out of the vaults as he was going down. This man really was as big as he’d remembered, too; he even still had that garish pink umbrella.

“Woah,” Ron and Neville said, craning their necks, and the man peered down at them and laughed.

“Look at what we got here, two new first-years! They get smaller every year, I swear! Excited to start the term?”

“M-mostly nervous, really,” Neville said, nervously petting Trevor, “I’m not very good with magic.”

“Well, Hogwarts is the best school in all of Britain for teaching you how to use it! You’ll improve in no time at all. If it can teach old Hagrid here, it can teach you!” the man laughed, patting Neville on the back. The boy stumbled forward from Hagrid’s strength, but Hermione and Ron caught him before he could trip over himself. Orochimaru looked around at the crowd of nervous ten and eleven-year-olds, and spotted a familiar blond boy sneering at him from across the platform.

“Ron, do you know who that is over there? The one making nasty faces at me?” Orochimaru asked, tugging on Ron’s robes. Ron looked back and rolled his eyes.

“Ugh, that’s probably Draco Malfoy, Lucius Malfoy’s son. They’re all twats, from what I’ve heard. We’ve got something of a feud going on with them from the last war – Dad hates the Malfoys more than anything I can think of.”

“What are your families feuding over?”

“Lucius Malfoy was a Death Eater – one of the bad guys,” Ron whispered into his ear, “My uncles were murdered by them, but Malfoy didn’t get sent to Azkaban like most of the lot. Told the Wizengamot he’d been Imperiused. Dad’s never believed that though.” Orochimaru glanced back at Draco again, who had turned his attention to a tall black boy and a white girl laughing with him. _Definitely from a wizard supremacist family, one that was possibly involved in my parents’ murders,_ he thought, _I’ll have to keep an eye on him. Could be useful to exploit his father’s connections._

Hagrid’s voice once again echoed throughout the station.

“First-years, welcome to Hogwarts! Yer’ in for something very special here, attendin’ this school. But first, we’ve got to get you there! Don’t worry, we’ll get yer’ luggage for you, just follow me!”

The crowd of children followed Hagrid off the station and through the forest clearing where the older students had gone through. They walked down a dirt path away from the main road which led down to the edge of a giant lake. They were ushered into small wooden boats, four students to each, and Orochimaru tucked himself beside Neville and opposite of Ron and Hermione. The boats moved as one across the lake without paddles, and as they crossed the dark waters, Orochimaru peered down into the abyss, and swore he saw pale, scaly faces looking up at him.

“Does anything live in the lake?” he called out to Hagrid, who was steering his own significantly larger boat with a long paddle.

“Jus’ a giant squid and some merfolk, nothin’ to worry about!”

“Don’t merfolk eat humans?” Neville asked, clutching Trevor and pointedly refusing to look in the water.

“Just sirens, and those are only found in Greece. I read that in _Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them_ ,” Hermione said matter-of-factly, looking down into the black water. Orochimaru splashed his hands into the lake a few times, and Neville whined at him about it, but nothing came up to the surface for the rest of their ride. _That’s no fun_ , he thought, staring into his pouting reflection.

The sun had fully set when the first-years docked their boats on the other side of the lake, and they followed Hagrid up the cobblestone path to the iron wrought gates of Hogwarts Castle. A stern witch in green robes was waiting for them from the main stairway into the castle. Most of the students looked up at her nervously; poor Neville and Ron trembled with barely hidden anxiety. Hermione and Orochimaru were all but vibrating with excitement though, and Minerva McGonagall’s stoic face broke into a soft smile when she saw how excited they were. Orochimaru didn’t miss her quick look of surprise when she saw him though – did she know who he was already?

“Good evening, first-years, and welcome to Hogwarts Castle,” she called out, voice as stony as her face was, “I am Professor McGonagall, Deputy Headmistress of Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry. You will be spending the next seven years here, learning everything that you will need to become an exemplary witch or wizard. Tomorrow may be the start of the term, but tonight, the school celebrates your arrival with a feast. If you would follow me to the Great Hall, and please, don’t take any staircases that I don’t. They know better than to mislead students that haven’t been Sorted yet, but they’re mischievous nonetheless.”

Orochimaru and Hermione all but shot up the stairs as she beckoned them up, dragging the reluctant Ron and Neville behind them. All four of them gazed in awe as they walked through the grandiose stone castle, the numerous portraits moving to wave and wink at them, the staircases indeed moving on their own as McGonagall had claimed, and a few translucent figures phasing in and out of ceilings and floors. 

“So, where do you all think you’ll be Sorted?” Hermione asked the other three as they followed McGonagall, “I think I’ll go into Ravenclaw or Gryffindor.”

“I’m a guaranteed Gryffindor,” Ron said proudly, “It’d make the front page of the Prophet if I didn’t.”

“I don’t know where I’ll end up. Hufflepuff sounds nice, I guess,” Neville mumbled.

“You’re Sorted on what you value, not your own character,” Orochimaru said, turning around to face Neville and walking backwards, “What do you think is most important, Neville? Bravery? Wit? Kindness? Ambition?”

“I dunno, I mean, I just turned 11, and now I’ve got to figure out the most important part of myself for the next seven years? It’s a lot, don’t you think?”

Orochimaru tilted his head and considered Neville’s words. When he’d first heard about Sorting, he’d also felt that the process pigeonholed children into archetypes too early on. Better to leave those types of matters for later in life, in his opinion. 

“A fair point, Longbottom, and one that I agree with. But if you had to choose, where would you like to go?”

“Um…Hufflepuff, I think,” Neville said bashfully, “But I’d like to be a little braver, too.”

“So the record shall show,” Orochimaru said, smiling at Neville. In his honest opinion, this kid was a nervous, unconfident mess, but so was Suigetsu on a Tuesday, and he turned out to be a decent shinobi, so there was hope for Longbottom yet. 

“As for myself, Hermione,” and Orochimaru lowered his voice so that only the other three could hear him, “I think I’ll be a Ravenclaw or Slytherin.” Neville’s face paled, Hermione nodded like she expected that answer, and Ron looked at him like he had grown a second head.

“Slytherin? Are you mad? That was You-Know-Who’s house!” Ron hissed, “You _defeated_ him, Harry, why not Gryffindor? Weren’t your parents in our House too?”

Orochimaru shrugged his shoulders. “Just a hunch.”

“’Just a hunch,’ he says. World’s gone upside-down, that’s what it’s done.”

“Well, they do value cunning and determination, so I can see it,” Hermione said, her bright, blunt honesty making Ron look at her like _she_ had sprouted another head too. 

“Both of you, mad!”

“After those games, you don’t think he’s both?” she said, raising an eyebrow. Ron sighed and shook his head.

McGonagall and her gaggle of first-years soon arrived at the doors to the Great Hall. With a flick of her wand, the doors swung open, and hundreds of students cheered as the new first-years walked down the center aisle. 

Orochimaru’s eyes wandered again as he took in the four long banquet tables, each covered in its House colors, then up to the bewitched ceiling that looked like the clear starry night outside, and then down to the end of the room, where the teachers sat facing the students. Hagrid was there, standing in the back, leaning down and chatting with a short, elderly woman in a Victorian nurse’s gown. A plump woman sat next to a significantly shorter man in a tuxedo, both drinking wine and watching the students. The man in the purple turban that he had seen with Hagrid at the inn was also there, fidgeting nervously, but smiling at the celebration in front of him. Besides him was a man in all black who very clearly wanted to be somewhere else, and in the center of the table, an old wizard in starry robes with a long white beard and crescent-shaped eyeglasses looked fondly at the new students. He tapped a spoon against a drinking glass, the ringing sound bringing the students down to a calmer lull.

“Students, thank you for welcoming our new first-years to Hogwarts. First-years, I am Albus Dumbledore, Headmaster of Hogwarts. I hope that you shall find the next seven years here most enjoyable and enlightening. But before you start your classes, you must be Sorted into your Houses. When Professor McGonagall calls your name, please come up at take a seat on the stool at the front.”

The first-years crowded around the front of the room and looked on as McGonagall picked up a very worn-looking hat from a stool in front of the teachers’ table and procured a lengthy parchment from the sleeves of her robes. She unfurled it and announced the first student to be Sorted.

“Abbott, Hannah,” she called out, and a blonde, sleepy looking girl walked out of the crowd and sat on the stool. McGonagall placed the hat on Abbott’s head, and it suddenly began to move, a simulacrum forming out of the wrinkles of its fabric. It hemmed and hawed as if it had a mouth, and after a few moments the Sorting Hat made its decision.

“HUFFLEPUFF!” it cried, and the House of yellow and black cheered as they welcomed the new first-year. The rest of the sorting went in a similar manner; the hat openly waffled between Gryffindor and Ravenclaw on Hermione but in the end chose Gryffindor, outright argued with Neville between Hufflepuff and Gryffindor and picked the latter much to Orochimaru’s amusement, and it barely touched the hairs on Malfoy’s head when it yelled “SLYTHERIN!”. It had just decided that Parvati Patil would be yet another Gryffindor when McGonagall read out the next name.

“Potter, Harry.”

The hall suddenly buzzed with chatter as the students tried to get a good look at which student was the famous Potter. Orochimaru clicked his tongue in irritation as he tried to walk up to the stool with some dignity, but he could hear whispers of “Is that him? He’s so tiny!” and “Where’s his scar? Can you see it?”. He looked up and saw that most of the teachers were also whispering to each other, save two. The man in black who had previously looked like he would’ve rather died rather than be there (except when a new Slytherin announced, then he looked a little less like death), was now surprised, staring at Orochimaru. Dumbledore, however, was studying him, he knew for certain. He looked as mildly happy as he had earlier, but his brows were a little more furrowed, his eyes a little more strained. _Concern, then,_ Orochimaru thought, _or maybe distrust. Never could get those two right._

He sat on the stool, glancing at the Slytherin table, and saw the outright shock on some of the Slytherin first-years’ faces, including the girl he’d met in Knockturn a few weeks ago. He waved at her, and she bristled while her classmates crowded around her, pestering her for details.

McGonagall placed the Hat on his head, and Orochimaru felt it morph into its face of wrinkles.

“Harry Potter, you say? Hm…interesting…” the Hat said, “A very, very interesting name…” It stayed silent for several minutes, occasionally letting a “hmmm” or another “interesting”. Orochimaru awkwardly looked out over the crowd in front of him, who watched back in rapt attention, silently begging for the famous Harry Potter to be part of _their_ House. He glanced up at the fabric brim.

“I’d like to eat dinner soon, Sorting Hat,” Orochimaru asked with some irritation. McGonagall glared down at him, and he glared right back at her. The Sorting Hat laughed at him.

“Patience, master wizard, I must confess that this is not what I expected from the son of the Potters, and there is a lot in your heart to consider here. I see that cunning that the Slytherins cherish, and you would do well there indeed – “

There was a collective gasp from the Slytherin table, and Orochimaru heard many dissenting whispers from the other tables.

“ - but nay, your desire to learn the truths of this world supersedes all, and so I shall Sort you into RAVENCLAW!”

The blue and bronze table exploded into cheers, while the Slytherins openly mourned their loss. Orochimaru stepped off the stool and trotted down to the table, and his new House greeted him with no shortage of slaps to the back and handshaking. The other Houses were almost as animated, but Dumbledore clinked his glass once more, and everyone quieted down again to continue with Sorting. Orochimaru watched the other first-years file by. Ron was placed in Gryffindor, as expected, and once Blaise Zabini was put into Slytherin, the headmaster rose from his seat.

“It is always a pleasure to see a whole round of Sorting every year. But now, the part that you’ve all been waiting for…the feast!” Dumbledore announced, and with a snap of his fingers all sorts of dishes covered the banquet tables. Orochimaru’s mouth watered immediately at the smell of the roast fowl in front of him. He dug in as soon as it hit the table, and _Sage, this is divine_ , he thought as he bit into the juicy meat. It was easily the best meal he’d had in decades.

“Slow down there, Potter, wouldn’t want you choking on a bone and dying on us before the term even starts!” an older boy down the table shouted down the table, and his House laughed while he finished chewing on a mouthful of dark meat. The boy next to him (another first-year, a tan boy by the name of Terry Boot, if he recalled correctly) passed him a glass of water.

“This’ll be a riot to write home about. ‘Hey mum, school’s going well, I sat next to Harry Potter at the Start-of-Term Feast, he demolished a whole chicken’,” Boot said. Orochimaru smirked into his water cup.

“We’re going to a school to learn _magic_ , I’m sure there’ll be far more interesting things to write about than my appetite,” he said.

The girl on the other side of him – Padma, another first-year, he remembered - nudged him with her elbow and pointed towards the Slytherin table. “Potter, what’s with the Slytherins? Do you know them?”

Orochimaru shrugged. “Never met one,” he claimed, but he had a guess as to what the Slytherins were in a tizzy about. How cruel, to have Harry Potter dangled right in front of your House, only to have him snatched away by another. Malfoy was staring at him, not even touching his food, and Orochimaru looked back, considering the boy. Clearly Malfoy wanted to know the mythical Harry Potter, had trusted him even through a henge. Yes, it would be easy for him to coerce information out of Malfoy.

But for the moment, he was more concerned about food. He shrugged and looked away from Malfoy, focusing instead on a shepherd’s pie that just popped onto the platter in front of him. 

“Quirrell’s the new DADA professor, huh? Never thought he was gutsy enough to take on something like that,” an older girl across from Orochimaru mused, looking at the line of teachers eating.

“How do you think he’ll get canned, Eliza?” a boy next to her asked, “I don’t want anything too bad to happen to him, I liked having him for Muggle Studies.”

“Which one’s Quirrell?” Orochimaru asked. Eliza pointed to the man with the purple turban.

“That’s him, Quirinus Quirrell, our old Muggle Studies professor. Went on sabbatical last year, but looks like he’s come back. He’s pretty mousy, I really don’t know why Dumbledore let him take the spot. I didn’t think he’d disliked him that much.”

“What does that have to do with Quirrell becoming the Defense Against the Dark Arts professor?” Orochimaru asked, confused. 

“You haven’t heard?” Terry cut in, “There’s a curse on the DADA position. No professor has lasted for more than a year for the past 50 years.”

“You’d think that Dumbledore would’ve cleared the curse by now since he’s the greatest wizard in the world and all, but it must be really nasty if he hasn’t,” Eliza said.

Orochimaru looked down the hall at Dumbledore, who was speaking quietly with McGonagall. Maybe it was the beard and the sparkly robes, but he couldn’t really picture the all-powerful wizard as anything but a benevolent old teacher. And if he was as powerful as everyone made him out to be, then what kind of curse was on the DADA spot? Who had left the curse in the first place?

Eventually the feast ended, the students and staff full and groggy, Dumbledore rose from his seat once more.

“Before we retire for the evening, I must make some announcements. First, as always, the Forbidden Forest is off-limits to students are not being supervised by a staff member. They are called ‘forbidden’ for a reason, after all. Many creatures live in the forest that can harm or even kill a student with little effort – they are dangerous and should be avoided at all costs.”

 _First chance I get, I’m going into that forest_ , Orochimaru thought. It was stupid, really, to call something “forbidden” and not expect him to immediately go to it. It was doubly stupid to say that there were deadly things in the forest – that was a challenge for him, not a warning.

“Additionally, the third-floor corridors on the east end of the castle are also off-limits this year.”

 _And he just keeps on giving_ , Orochimaru thought with a smirk. Between breaking these rules and keeping up with his studies, he was going to be busy for the whole year. But for now, he was a good little student and got up with the rest of his classmates to retire to the dormitories, following the Ravenclaw prefect and a professor through the castle and up many, many, _many_ flights of stairs, until they finally came to the pale limestone entrance to Ravenclaw Tower. A thick wooden door blocked the way into the common room, and a bronze knocker in the shape of an eagle stared down the crowd of students. It came alive and squawked at the prefect.

“I am not poor, but I do not go out. What am I?”

“A welcome,” the prefect answered, and the eagle knocker nodded as the door opened.

“And I extend one to you, my new Ravenclaws,” the knocker said, “Welcome to your new home.”

“It has the same riddle every year on the first night,” the prefect said to the students behind him, “But don’t worry, they get trickier throughout the year.”

The students filed into the circular common room, a cold, moonlit area that looked more like a library than a lounge. There were blue velvet armchairs and cushions all around, and where there weren’t windows or entranceways cutting through the walls, there were bookshelves instead. Orochimaru glanced out one of the windows and down at the Forbidden Forest; it seemed endless underneath the tower, extending into the dark of night.

“Alright, firsties, gather ‘round. Rest of you, lights out in an hour,” the prefect called out, standing by a statue of a woman in the center of the common room. While the older students headed up the stairs to their dorms, Orochimaru and his yearmates crowded around the statue.

“Welcome to Ravenclaw!” the prefect said, “As you’ve most likely inferred from your Sorting, we’re the house of wit and knowledge, so we expect to see good grades from all of you. Our Head of House is Professor Flitwick – “ and he gestured to the short professor standing on the other side of the statue – “who you’ll be seeing every Tuesday and Thursday morning for Charms. Boys dorm to the north, girls to the south, your class schedule will be with your belongings that were brought up here. Curfew is after dinner every night, including weekends. Any questions?”

A dozen hands raised in the air, and the prefect started calling on them, but Orochimaru ignored the chatter in favor of studying the statue in front of him. The woman made of smooth gray stone was tall and stern, not unlike McGonagall, a wand clutched in one hand and a book in the other. Her dress was weighty, more shapeless robe than form-fitting dress, but even as an unmoving statue she carried herself with the grace of nobility.

“The great Rowena Ravenclaw,” Flitwick said, walking up to Orochimaru, “One of the founders and first professors here at Hogwarts. Certainly, the greatest witch of her time alongside Helga Hufflepuff, she was said to have a gift for designing magical artifacts. The floor plan to this very castle is one of them – it is unlikely any one of us will observe any arrangement of the halls and staircases more than once in our lifetimes.”

“Interesting,” Orochimaru said, staring back at the statue. He recognized the familiar sternness of an old teacher in the statue’s eyes – the face of one who expected nothing less than a student’s best. He thought it was a shame he would never meet her.

“I taught your parents, Mr. Potter, but never did I expect their child to join my house,” Flitwick said, twirling his mustache, his voice a little wistful, “I hope you do make us proud.”

Orochimaru grinned wickedly. Oh, he’d live up to the wit and knowledge bit of the House values, all right. “Of course, Professor,” he cackled.

Flitwick glanced up at him, studying what he thought was a mischievous smirk on his student’s face. He’d seen it on a select few students over the course of his teaching career, and it was usually followed by all sorts of trouble. He pinched the bridge of his nose and silently gave a prayer for an uneventful school year; the Weasley twins were bad enough, but adding a Potter to the mix? Hogwarts was liable to burn down. 

Flitwick cleared his voice, silencing the first years. “Now students, it is late, and it’s time you were off for bed. We all have a busy day tomorrow, I’m certain.”

With a chorus of ‘thank you’ and ‘good night’, the students scattered to their dorms, ascending the dual staircases to their rooms on the floor above. The first-year boy’s dorm was made of the same white stone as the common room, but made more homey with the rich navy blues of their beddings and rugs. Orochimaru found his trunk on the bed farthest from the door, right next to a window overlooking what appeared to be a football pitch, but with three towering hoops on either end of the field. He peered straight down the window as much as he could; the stone walls looked uneven and rough and would make for easy climbing. It would be trivial to sneak out when he wanted.

“You’ve only got one trunk, Potter? Where’s the rest of your stuff?” another first-year, a pale boy by the name of Michael Corner, asked Orochimaru. Not looking away from the window, with a wave of his hand, Orochimaru willed the trunk to open, and his books and clothing erupted out in full size and onto the bed, spilling over onto the ground. 

The other boys let out a collective “woah”, and Orochimaru rolled his eyes. He’d mastered that when he was, what? Eight, maybe? He stepped back from the window and climbed onto what little room he had left on the bed, grabbing his folded robes and stuffing them into the bedside dresser. His housemates began to do the same, chatting with each other. They all gave Orochimaru curious glances every now and then but couldn’t bring themselves to go up to him and try to start a conversation. How would you walk up to the Boy Who Lived, who was clearly some sort of prodigy with magic, and make small talk? He was just too intimidating.

They all finished unpacking and got ready for bed, and as Orochimaru tucked in for the night, he let another smile creep up onto his face. Finally, he was _here,_ in a proper place of learning. It was already shaping up to be the best year of his new life yet, and he drifted off to sleep, unaware of the three small pairs of serpentine eyes watching him from the shadows.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to everyone who's kudos'd, commented, and/or bookmarked this fic! Even when I was at my busiest and most stressed for the past month, it always made me incredibly happy to see someone interacting with this work! Seriously, this is usually how it went:
> 
> me: *see email notification from ao3*  
> email: Comment on Nothing But One Of...  
> me: [cryingcat.png] 
> 
> Now that I think I've gotten a hang of my schedule for the rest of the year, I think I can handle monthly updates, so I'll probably just stick to updating on the 11th of each month.
> 
> I've also set up a Tumblr! You can find me at [dopekanna](https://dopekanna.tumblr.com/). I've mostly just been reblogging HP, Naruto, and writing inspiration stuff.


	5. Chapter 5

It was almost 8 in the morning and Orochimaru would’ve liked to have been back in bed.

It was the nicest bed he’d slept on in a very long time. The mattress was firm, the blankets were cozy, and he would’ve liked those extra five minutes, but _no_ , the prefect had to bang on their door at the crack of dawn, all cheer and smiles and “Rise and shine, it’s the first day of school!”. He had instinctively fished around for kunai under his pillow, but then he remembered that his knives were still locked up in his trunk, and that also maiming the House prefect was maybe frowned upon. 

So instead, he was not in bed but sitting at the front of McGonagall’s classroom, next to Hermione who was wide awake and raring to go, much to his mild jealousy. She was nose deep in her copy of the Transfiguration textbook, shaking with barely controlled excitement. He would’ve been excited too, if he’d known where Professor McGonagall was. Instead, there was a cat sitting at the desk staring them down - a very familiar cat, in fact. It was the cat that had occasionally sat outside the Dursley home and watched him mingle with the snakes in the garden. 

He stared back at it, raising one tired eyebrow in question. “I wonder whose cat that is,” he mused nonchalantly to Hermione. She quickly glanced up at the tabby.

“It’s probably Professor McGonagall’s,” she said just as the bell tolled for the start of class, and the cat jumped off the table and transformed into their Transfiguration professor. Hermione gasped and almost dropped her textbook, but Orochimaru’s other eyebrow followed the first. _Why was McGonagall keeping an eye on me?_ he thought.

“Wicked,” Ron whispered from his seat behind Orochimaru, looking up at McGonagall in awe.

“How did you do that?” Hermione asked.

“A very specialized form of Transfiguration, Ms. Granger, and while you will not be taught the theory until third year, I’ve found that demonstrating Animagus transformations sufficiently motivates first year students to persevere through the more technical aspects of this course.”

“Transfiguration is a complicated area of magic, and one with serious real-world consequences if mishandled,” McGonagall lectured, walking slowly between the twin rows of student benches, “Many witches and wizards have been permanently disfigured or even killed by botched Transfiguration spells. There will be no tomfoolery in my class, and you will leave my class if I see you practicing such. Are we clear?”

“Yes, Professor,” the students echoed. McGonagall nodded sharply, her mouth pulled into a serious, straight line, and walked back to the blackboard.

“Very good. Open your textbooks to chapter 1,” she said, grabbing a piece of chalk off her desk and writing symbols on the board. Orochimaru opened his book, the first page showing line after line of equations in those same symbols. He knew them already, of course, had memorized them those first few days he was staying in Diagon Alley, but a review of the basics was always welcome.

Halfway through the lecture, McGonagall put down the nub of chalk and handed out matchbooks to each pair of students.

“We’ll begin our first practical demonstration now. I would like you to use the basic concepts we just discussed to turn a single match into a needle,” she said, holding a match in one hand and her wand pointed at it with the other, “The incantation is ‘Nerefors’.” 

The match in her hand slimmed down into a shining, pointy sewing needle. “You may begin,” she said, and the classroom filled with the sounds of children trying their best to will a piece of wood into metal.

Orochimaru drew his wand at the same time as Hermione did beside him, and they glanced at each other. She had a small, closed smile on her face.

“Count of three?” she asked.

“Sure,” he said with a lazy swish of his wand, “One, two, three…”

“Nerefors!” they incantated with identical flourishes of their wands. Hermione’s match shrank and turned silver, but its tip was still blunted. Orochimaru’s match though, it grew instead into a long, silver needle, both tips sharpened to dangerous points. He picked it up gingerly, twirling it in his fingers and grinning to himself. It probably wasn’t what McGonagall was expecting per se, but she hadn’t specified what kind of needle to Transfigure either.

“Will this do, Professor?” he called out to Professor McGonagall, who was on the other side of the classroom watching Neville and Boot (the only other mixed-House pair sitting in the class besides himself and Hermione, he noted absently) struggle to even turn their matches gray. She looked back to Orochimaru and blinked at the boy holding up the senbon, though she did not know that was what it was called. Very few first-year students had ever managed to fully Transfigure the match by the end of the period, much less on the first try, and yet Harry Potter, watching her with smug green eyes on a familiar face, had done it.

“I was not aware that you were familiar with acupuncture, Mr. Potter,” she said, walking up to his bench. Orochimaru looked at the needle in his hand and shrugged.

“Not really, no. I saw it in a book once,” he half-lied. He might have _generously_ claimed to be familiar with acupuncture, specifically the “puncture” part, and more specifically the “puncturing vital organs” part of expected senbon use. McGonagall held out her hand, and Orochimaru carefully laid it in her palm. She studied it, holding it like a wand and pricking her finger on the tip of the needle, and Orochimaru quickly realized that he didn’t know if the tips were also Transfigured to be poisoned. A small bead of blood bloomed on McGonagall’s finger, but she did not seem to fall ill. He breathed a sigh of relief; the professor was an excellent teacher, and he appreciated her professional demeanor that he found lacking in his Muggle education.

“Full marks for today, Mr. Potter,” she said quietly, laying the senbon back on his desk, “Would you mind assisting the students around you for the rest of class? I think Ms. Granger, Mr. Weasley, and Mr. Finnegan would like to ask you a few questions.”

Orochimaru turned to Hermione, who was watching him with wide eyes and a thousand burning questions behind them. He looked back at Ron and the boy with wild hair (and who smelled faintly of smoke?) sitting next to him, equally in awe. It looked like the whole class had stopped to stare at him, actually – _annoying,_ he thought with a slight frown. McGonagall also noticed, and she levelled a stern gaze at the rest of the class. 

“I did not say you could stop working, did I?” she said. The rest of the students looked away hurriedly and went back to work, but the trio around Orochimaru leaned towards him.

“You really are some kind of genius, aren’t you Harry?” Ron asked. 

“Who can say?” Orochimaru said with another shrug. 

Half an hour, one almost-needle, two half-needles-half-matchsticks, and five small piles of ash courtesy of Seamus Finnegan’s affinity for fire (Orochimaru stopped being amused after the third match went up in flames, _how was he doing that_ ), McGonagall dismissed her class with a whole chapter of reading and a lab report on their results with their Transfiguration attempts today.

“Well, that wasn’t too bad,” Hermione said, packing her books into her bag. Ron held his head in his hands and groaned.

“It can’t be that hard to Transfigure a match, can it?” he whined. Seamus sneezed, sending ash into the air, and Ron groaned again as he waved it out of his face. Orochimaru was absently packing his bag with one hand, holding the Transfiguration textbook open in the other. He shrugged at Ron’s question, not really listening but not really reading the book either. His brows were slightly tense as his mind schemed. 

Pensie had taught him how to _do_ magic, but her repertoire was unbalanced, and she hadn’t known the theory behind some of the spells or how they truly worked. And yes, he had read through the textbook when he was holed up in Diagon, but a teacher could always tell him _more_ – but that brought his mind back to McGonagall, and he frowned deeper thinking about her.

 _Why was she watching me when I was with the Dursleys?_ he wondered. He was no stranger to such surveillance, but at least he’d always been aware of Yamato. Not knowing why he was being watched was far more irritating. _Was she related to my parents somehow? Was she supposed to be the one to introduce me to the magic – one of the Muggleborns said at breakfast she met Professor Flitwick a few days after she got her letter? Was she there to supervise me? For what reason? And if she’s deputy headmistress, then she’s probably reporting to the headmaster – Dumbledore, who is …concerned about me? Suspicious of me?_ Orochimaru still wasn’t sure.

“Wrong way, Harry. Don’t read while you walk,” someone said, pulling on the sleeve of Orochimaru’s robes and dragging him away from a set of stairs. Orochimaru glanced back at Hermione tugging on his robes. He’d been walking in the opposite direction of their next class, distracted by his mental scheming. 

“Old habits die hard,” he grumbled as he hid his face with his textbook and let himself be pulled along, not bothering to acknowledge the weird looks he got from the students they passed. The upperclassmen that passed by them couldn’t help but stare at the tiny Gryffindor firstie dragging along their mythical child-hero who defeated You-Know-Who. There may have been a few squeals of “that’s so cute!” that Orochimaru definitely did not hear – he was not _cute_ , he was the S-rank Snake Sannin, and he was only letting Hermione drag him along because he appreciated intelligent people like her and not because he was reminded of someone or anything like that, how dare they –

Ron, who was following behind them, snickered at Orochimaru’s face slowly growing more and more annoyed. “You could just ask her to let go, you know,” he said, but Orochimaru huffed at that.

“It’s convenient,” he muttered darkly, and he ignored how Ron’s laughter reminded him of someone from the past for the rest of the walk to History of Magic.

\---

 _This is a waste of my time_ , Orochimaru thought. Binns was the worst lecturer he’d ever had the displeasure of being taught by, and he wondered why Hogwarts let the ghost keep teaching instead of ushering him into Purgatory, even if they probably didn’t have to pay him. He tapped his quill in irritation as he stared at the back of Binns’ translucent head and looked around the room. All the Gryffindors and half of the Ravenclaws had mentally checked out already; on his left, Ron was catching up on sleep, and on his right, Hermione was giving his tapping quill an evil look (he didn’t stop – he really was quite annoyed). There were a few Ravenclaws on the other side of the room that were half paying attention, half getting a head start on the Transfiguration homework. Orochimaru silently sighed and pulled out the DADA textbook. He figured he might as well catch up on his reading.

(He made a game out of dodging Hermione’s clumsy attempts to get him to stop tapping his quill throughout the class. Maybe next time he’d tie a little bell to his quill, for old times’ sake.)

Finally, the lunch bell rang, and the Gryffindor and Ravenclaw first-years drowsily filed out of Binns’ classroom. Ron had woken up the moment he heard the first gong and had dashed out of the room like a bat out of Hell, Hermione chasing after him with a textbook he’d left behind on his seat, leaving Orochimaru to his own devices. He’d barely registered the bell himself, his focus still on his book. He’d gotten up and left with the rest of his class, but once again his habits were leading him down the wrong hall. The other Ravenclaw first-years, all grouped up in their own little crowd, looked at each other awkwardly as they saw him miss the turn to go to the Great Hall, instead heading down towards the Charms classroom. A blond boy in the group jogged out of the group and gently grabbed hold of the back of Orochimaru’s robe, trying to mimic what Hermione did.

“Potter, the Great Ha – “ Anthony Goldstein started to say, but –

Orochimaru whirled round and clamped his hands on the other boy’s in a cold, piercing grip. He stared at him with a paralyzing glare, and the boy could have sworn that for a moment, Orochimaru’s eyes seemed to glow. The boy shrieked and stumbled back, and Orochimaru let him go quickly, letting the boy fall backwards onto the stone.

“Wha-wha-what’d you do that for?” the boy almost sobbed, scrambling backwards and looking up at those cold, cold eyes. Orochimaru didn’t both to show any sympathy, just went back to reading his textbook.

“I don’t like it when people do that, Goldstein,” Orochimaru said, walking back in the correct direction, not looking up from his book at all.

“Then what’s so special about those Gryffindors, huh?” Corner sneered, stepping in front of Orochimaru’s way, “Ravenclaws should stick together.”

Orochimaru rolled his eyes and stepped around him. “I’ll sit where I want in class. I also don’t recall there being a rule against mingling with students from other houses, and even if there were, it should be ignored. Hermione and Ron are good company.”

“Then you should’ve been a Gryffindor if you want to hang out with them so much,” Corner spat.

Orochimaru cackled, a sharp, dry laugh that sent chills down the spines of the rest of the Ravenclaw first-years. He turned back to Corner and gave him that same chilling look that had once paralyzed battle-hardened jounin. It was the face of a snake about to make a killing strike, and many of the Ravenclaws took a step back away from their very scary Potter.

“You all know nothing about me,” Orochimaru hissed, “and for all that you claim to be Ravenclaw, your analyses are so clearly misguided if you conclude that I should’ve gone to _Gryffindor_ , of all houses. A pathetic show of intellect you’ve performed here.”

He turned back to his book and briskly walked away, leaving behind his stunned yearmates. When they entered the Great Hall after Orochimaru, who’d taken a seat next to the House prefect, they were wary and made a point to sit away from him.

“Everything alright with you and the rest of the class, Potter?” the prefect whispered to him, glancing at the other students. He thought it was awfully early in the year for any serious bullying and ostracizing to begin.

“We had a disagreement. There is nothing to be worried about,” Orochimaru said blandly, absently picking apart a bread roll as he read on in his DADA textbook and listened to his upperclassmen complain about owls and newts for some reason. The prefect looked down at him, a little worried, and pushed his observations to the back of his mind for the time being.

\---

DADA should have been interesting, but from the moment Quirrell opened his mouth Orochimaru knew he was in for another hour of boredom. It wasn’t necessarily that Professor Quirrell didn’t know anything about Defense magic – quite the opposite, if the rune charts that lined the walls of the dark classroom were any indicator of the man’s intellect. Those were fascinating to Orochimaru, and he made a note to corner his professor and interrogate him about them. Yet for all his professor’s supposed interest in Defense magic…

Orochimaru slumped in his seat as Quirrell nearly jumped out of his clothes at the sound of one of the Hufflepuff boys in the back scooting their chair on the stone floor. This man was probably scared of his own shadow, and he wondered why the headmaster had even let him teach a class that was all about fighting against the things to be feared. He certainly had the classroom aesthetics down - the bubbling concoctions at the front of the classroom that hissed and threatened to eat away at their pewter containers, the huge iguana that wrapped around his neck, the candles that cast misshapen shadows across his face – but then he would basically stumble over his own feet and the illusion of eeriness would be broken.

Orochimaru glanced over at the Ravenclaw girl next to him, the poor child shaking in her seat as Quirrell launched into a rambling tale of zombies in Morocco. He resisted the urge to turn around and see how everyone else was doing, but he could _smell_ their fear, the tension coming off the students behind him. Honestly, he found it all a little pathetic. Zombies weren’t anything to be feared - so long as you weren’t on the business end of their weapon or jutsu of choice, you were only marginally less safe than before.

Then again, Orochimaru wasn’t fully accustomed to how necromancy worked in this world. Quirrell was making it sound like zombies were mindless reanimated corpses, which to Orochimaru just meant that their summoner was incompetent. He briefly wondered if Edo Tensei would work in this world, if the laws of the afterlife or a lack thereof were compatible with the jutsu. Maybe he’d summon a few zombies to chase around Quirrell, make class more interesting.

There was another odd thing about DADA – it felt familiar to Orochimaru, like maybe he’d done this before. Perhaps his surroundings reminded him of his original Otogakure labs, those literal holes in the wall full of scientific abominations, but he wasn’t sure. He looked around the room again, tuning out Quirrell’s story and trying to avoid making eye contact with anyone. Unfortunately, he locked eyes with the girl sitting next to him, who had been sneaking a glance at him. She quickly averted her eyes and shivered.

Orochimaru rolled his eyes. Wasn’t there anyone with independent thought in his house? 

He tuned out of the rest of Professor Quirrell’s Very Scary Story of How He Made Himself Bait for a Horde of Zombies for the rest of the period. It was a shame it was too dark for him to do any reading; Quirrell’s voice made for good background noise.

When the bell rang for the end of the period, the children all but ran out the door, save for Orochimaru who was quite bored. The girl he’d been sitting next to ran over to the other Ravenclaw girls, most of whom looked at him with suspicion and started talking to her in whispers that were just a little too loud.

“You sat next to Potter, Sue?”

“I was already sitting there, he sat next to _me_!”

“Did he say anything to you?”

“No, he just ignored me. He’s not very friendly.”

Orochimaru made a show of ignoring them as he walked past and their non-whispers fell to actual whispers, but he did let an evil little smirk cross his face. It would be in poor form by his own standards to not be at least a little intimidating.

Next was Potions, down in the dungeons of the castle. Orochimaru’s eyes immediately lit up in glee as soon as he pushed through the hesitant Hufflepuffs and his own Ravenclaws crowding around the entrance and swung the doors to the classroom wide open. Now this, even if a little bit childish, was a proper laboratory. Strange concoctions in bottles behind glass cases? Check. Flasks with questionable and dangerous materials giving off weird odors? Check. Cabinets full of exotic herbs and minerals? Check. He hummed happily as he glided to the front bench and sat down, eyeing the bubbling cauldron next to him. Slowly, the other Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws filled in the benches, and Orochimaru looked at the person who had decided to become his lab partner, a nervous Terry Boot.

“H-Hey Potter, how’s your day been?” Boot asked. Orochimaru frowned slightly at him, and Boot almost jumped in his seat at the tiny change of expression – everyone was so easily scared, he thought.

“Fine, but I want to do something _interesting_ for once today,” Orochimaru complained, “Someone called Snape teaches this class, right?”

Boot shook in fear. “That’s right, m-my cousin said he’s the scariest professor at Hogwarts. Snape used to be a _Death Eater_ , from what I’ve heard.”

Orochimaru nodded silently at that. _Why is a former Death Eater teaching young children?_ he thought, _Wouldn’t that be considered a threat to our security?_ He also remembered his unusual reaction to his name; the man did look younger than most of the professors. _Maybe he knew my parents?_ _But that wasn’t a reaction that someone would make to a child of an ideological enemy -_

The doors to the classroom slammed open and Professor Snape swept through the classroom, his black cloak trailing behind him. Some of the students dove into their benches to get out of his way as their teacher sped up and turned to the frightened students with an ominous sweep of his cloak. Orochimaru rolled his eyes at the dramatics – did the man think he was a vampire from a Muggle fantasy novel?

“Put your wands away,” Snape growled, “Errant fiddling can cause you to turn your brew into bilgewater. You cannot make a Felix Felicis with things like ‘faith’ or ‘willpower’ alone, contrary to what those Gryffindors believe. You will use magical ingredients in your potions, but make no mistake, there is no mystical element to potionmaking. It is a science, and you must be exacting if you wish to create miracles out of the material plane. Am I clear?”

The class nodded, the Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws meekly murmuring a “yes” to their professor. Orochimaru hummed his assent, but he wasn’t cowed. This was setting up a relationship based on fear, not respect, and it would all fall apart if the students weren’t afraid. Plus for all he knew, Snape could be just as useless as Binns or Quirrell. Boot nudged him gently with his elbow, interrupting Orochimaru’s train of thought.

“Potter, he’s looking at us,” he whispered with a quivering voice, and Orochimaru glanced up at his professor, who was staring him down with an unconvincing evil look, his arms crossed to wrap his black cloak around himself in what he thought was his professor’s attempt at being intimidating. He could almost laugh; he’d trained genin that were scarier than this man.

“Am I clear, Potter?” Snape asked. Orochimaru heard Terry’s breath hitch beside him and he really, really tried not to roll his eyes.

“Yes, Professor,” he said evenly.

Snape looked down at him, walking slowly towards his bench. “Tell me, Potter, how do you use mistletoe as an antidote even though it’s a poisonous plant?”

Orochimaru’s eyes narrowed. “Mistletoe leaves are laxatives, but the berries are non-toxic in small quantities. Mix the berries with ground unicorn horn in a mixture of standard and bezoar to create an antidote for weak poisons.”

“When making a Wiggenweld potion, what ingredient makes it change color from yellow to green?”

“Salamander blood.”

“When making Weedosoros, how many times should you stir the brew after you’ve added clover?”

“Clover isn’t an ingredient in that poison.” Orochimaru’s eyes narrowed further at that question. Weedsoros wasn’t in the first-year curriculum, as far as he knew; Snape was trying to humiliate him on the first day. If he kept on going at this rate, he would be more than inclined to express his opinion on his teacher’s unprofessionalism in a variety of manners involving blood loss.

“Correct,” Snape hissed instead through gritted teeth, “Seems you’ve been reading ahead, Potter.”

Orochimaru smirked, and Snape’s eyebrow twitch. _I know this game, and I can play it better than anyone you will ever meet_ , he thought.

“Thank you, Professor, I do enjoy studying potionmaking, and I hope to learn a lot from you while I am a student at this school,” he said sweetly and without a shred of respect for Snape as a human being. Back on his face though was the scheming smile and calculating eyes, and Snape gave him a wary side glance. The professor scowled at him and swept through the classroom, ignoring Orochimaru for the remainder of the semester as he went over the basic potion ingredients with the class. Orochimaru sighed as he took down notes and set up his lab station – he really did love being in a lab. He loved it even more when he turned in a perfectly brewed herbicide potion at the end of class and Snape almost snarled as he wrote a 100 on his grade sheet. 

Finally, after Snape had exhausted his class through sheer intimidation, the first-year Ravenclaws broke from the pack of Hufflepuffs and hurried their way down to Greenhouse 1 for Herbology. Orochimaru looked forlornly through the slight condensation on the glass panes at Greenhouse 3 and the writhing, living plants and poisonous herbs that Professor Sprout was wrangling back into their pots. He wanted to do that; Sprout looked like she was having fun. 

“Hmph, why do we have to learning _gardening_?” someone next to him whined.

Orochimaru turned to face Draco Malfoy standing next to him, picking at his soil-covered beige robe cover with a look of disgust. He glanced across the two long benches facing each other in the greenhouse at the rest of the Slytherins, who were watching Malfoy with curiosity or concern, or a little bit of both. The two large boys towards the far end of the bench seemed especially worried about what was going on up there. 

“Good afternoon to you too, Slytherin. I’ve been told by my house that you’re probably on the wrong side of the classroom,” he said.

“My name’s Draco Malfoy, I’ll have you know. And I think I can stand wherever I please.”

“I agree. Good afternoon, Malfoy. I think you know who I am.”

Malfoy snorted, unamused. “Yes, Potter, I do. Greengrass told us about you.”

“Did she now? And what did she say?” Orochimaru asked, looking down the bench at Daphne. He gave her a little wave again, and she waved back.

“Nothing important, but we all think you should’ve been a Slytherin.”

Malfoy said the last part of that sentence louder, and the row of Ravenclaws that Orochimaru was buffering him from gave them both evil looks. Out of the corner of his eye, Orochimaru could see some of the boys around Corner whispering to each other with nasty looks on their faces – he made a note to put seals around his bed and belongings tonight. The Slytherins across from them continue watching their conversation with mild interest.

“It certainly would’ve been thematically appropriate, but I’ll pass. I quite like the view from Ravenclaw Tower,” Orochimaru said. Malfoy scoffed.

“Nonsense, we would be better for you than your Ravenclaws,” he sneered in the general direction of the other House, “You need someone to introduce you to the _right_ Wizarding families. Not like those Weasleys, you won’t get anywhere with them.”

Orochimaru looked up at the sneering Malfoy with a frown.

“Malfoy, mind your own business,” he said sharply and Malfoy stepped back at the harshness of Orochimaru’s voice.

“Guess you really are Scary Potter,” Malfoy muttered. Orochimaru almost laughed out loud at the nickname.

“Scary Potter, really? Who made up that one?”

“Your housemates,” Malfoy crowed, “It’s all over the school now, you know.”

“Good,” Orochimaru said blandly as he turned back to watch Sprout finally tame the writhing vines in the other greenhouse and hurry over to their own. Malfoy blinked at him in surprise, but before he could retort Sprout burst into the greenhouse, her robes covered in dirt and smelling distinctly of lavender. She sped past the students and up to the front of the class, panting with exhaustion.

“So sorry, dears, that Devil’s Snare just wasn’t working with me today! Hope you’ve been behaving yourselves!” she said, grabbing a rag off her desk and wiping down her sweating face, “I’m Professor Sprout, and welcome to your first Herbology class! Now, let’s get started on the basics…”

After a rousing lecture on the different (and completely safe, Orochimaru thought with some disappointment) plants that the first-years would be studying, all the students reconvened for dinner in the Great Hall. Once again, most of the first-year Ravenclaws made a point of sitting away from Orochimaru, except for Terry Boot, who seemed to be unable to choose if he was in awe of or afraid of him, and –

“Harry! It’s been too long!” Cho Chang squealed, all but tackling Harry into the prefect on his other side. The poor boy grunted at the force and gave them an annoyed look.

“Sorry about that, got carried away,” she laughed, pulling Orochimaru back up.

“It’s good to see you to,” Orochimaru said, brushing his robes back into place. His smile to her was genuine – he hadn’t forgotten her kindness. “I have your book, would you like it back?”

He pulled out the copy of _Curses and Counter-Curses_ from his bag – the edges of the pages were worn with years of daily use – and handed it back to Cho. She took it, thumbing through the pages, her eyes widening when she saw the sticky notes covered in small, neat handwriting that were on what seemed like every other page of the book.

“You read through this a lot…” she whispered in awe.

“Extensively,” Orochimaru said with a smirk, his eyes gleaming with malice. It was a shame he couldn’t test any of the spells without being punished by the Dursleys, but he’d come close to slinging one at them a few times when they were more insufferable than usual.

“No wonder all the firstie girls are saying you’re a genius!” she laughed, “How were classes today?”

Orochimaru pouted, stabbing at a piece of chicken on his plate with his fork a little harder. “Underwhelming. I thought it’d be more exciting.”

Cho sighed. “Me too, but it gets better when the Quidditch season starts. Say, you’re free tomorrow afternoon, right? Do you want me to show you around the castle? I doubt you’ve had much of a chance to go exploring.”

“I was planning on visiting the library,” he said offhandedly, and then Cho’s face really lit up.

“We could make a whole trip out of the library, there’s so much to look through there! Did you know Hogwarts has the largest library in all of Wizarding Britain outside of the Ministry’s archives? It’s – “

“We’re going to the library right now,” Orochimaru said, leaping out of his seat, but Cho dragged him back down, shaking her head.

“It closes at 8, you’ll only get to spend an hour there at most.”

“I can get a lot done in an hour,” he pouted, but he relented and turned back to the table. Cho laughed and ruffled his hair – another familiar gesture, different time, different person, but same warm feeling. 

“I’m sure you can, genius, but we can go tomorrow. I’ve got to catch up with the girls – meet me at the library after lunch tomorrow?”

“Will do,” he said, and Cho smiled at him again. It was familiar, the right smile on the wrong face from a lifetime ago, and Orochimaru’s heart leapt at the realization. He tamped down on the melancholy of remembering that those friends were long gone now as he watched Cho get up from her seat and walk down to the other end of the table.

“You – her – she’s – are you daft?” Terry sputtered across from him.

“What do you mean?” Orochimaru asked with a side glance, but Terry just groaned and held his head in his hands.

“She’s so - aagh! It’s been one day and even I know Cho Chang’s the most popular girl in Ravenclaw,” Terry said.

“Really? Good to know.”

Terry looked at him despairingly. “I don’t understand you, Potter.”

“I’m sure you don’t.”

(The prefect snorted into his pumpkin juice. He thought that maybe he was starting to like Potter.)

\---

Later that night, long after dinner had ended and the students had gone to sleep, Orochimaru silently rose from his bed, grabbed his wand, crept into the empty common room, and snuck out the door.

“Already? It’s only been a day…” the knocker sighed, but Orochimaru only stared back at it blankly.

“I should’ve known. I won’t say anything, but don’t get hurt. I’m still making you answer a riddle when you come back though,” it said, and Orochimaru nodded and sped away, sliding into the shadows of the castle corridors. He pushed the dual energies out through his body, letting it mix and wash over his skin –

When he walked out of the shadows, the little boy in pyjamas with green eyes and a lightning bolt scar was gone. Another child with long black hair and eyes like a snake’s dressed in a white yukata decorated with a collar of black tomoe silently ran through the stone halls barefoot and down the staircase. Orochimaru stopped under a window in the staircase down to the main castle, looking at the faint reflection of the henge under the moonlight. It had been a long time since he’d looked like this, and he twirled his long hair in his fingers, smiling in satisfaction. 

It was harder, having to make chakra without the whole organ system to do it for him, and he knew he’d be exhausted by the time he got back to the tower, but he didn’t feel like risking his identity on his first night exploring. Better to run into a nightguard in a disguise, in his opinion. Orochimaru made his way down the tower, into the main body of the castle, and headed towards the east end of the 3rd floor corridors. The torches in the halls had been put out, and Orochimaru zigzagged from shadow to shadow, letting the groans of the wind flowing through the hidden cracks in the castle walls muffle his footsteps.

 _Now let’s see what’s hidden here_ , he thought as he approached the 3rd floor corridor, which unlike the rest of the castle still had its torches lit. However, the shadow of a figure moved by the entrance to a door tucked in an alley of the hall, and Orochimaru hung back and watched. The shadow moved farther away, and then suddenly back towards the main corridor, and as he peered around the corner he saw a human figure with a rounded cap of some sort walking away from the hallway in frustration. Orochimaru squinted his eyes – it wasn’t a hat, but a turban instead? _What’s Professor Quirrell doing out here?_ he thought.

He waited for Quirrell’s footsteps and sweeping shadow to fade away, and once everything was silent and still, he ran over to the little alleyway. There was nothing special about the corridor, just a small stone hall with an iron door. Orochimaru walked up to the door and tugged on its handle gently. It was locked, of course, but there was an easy way around that. He pulled his wand out from the sleeve of his yukata and tapped it against the lock. _Alohomora._

Something in the door clicked, but just as he reached out to open it, a faint hissing voice echoed down the hall.

“<I think the young lord when this way?>” a low voice hissed.

“<He was very fast, just as his nest said. He looked very different though, has he already learned some of our magic?>” a second voice asked.

“<Pensie said that she couldn’t teach him though>,” a third voice said, and Orochimaru perked up at that. They knew Pensie? He locked the door with a Colloportus and crept back to the hallway, peering around the corners. At the end of the hall where he had come from, three winding shadows slithered closer. He shunshined to the end of the hall, landing on one knee right in front of three snakes that reared back at his sudden apperance. They were two small brown snakes, each about arm’s length long and nearly identical in appearance had it not been for the scarred, blind right eye on one of them, and one large sand colored python which looked up at Orochimaru in glee. 

“<Lord Potter!>” the python hissed in surprise.

“<It’s ‘Orochimaru’>,” he said. The snakes looked at each other and then back at him with curious gazes.

“<So it is true you have memories of another life, Lord…Orochimaru?>” the brown snake with the scar asked, “<Is this what you looked like?>”

Orochimaru nodded, and the snakes hissed happily. They slithered closer to him, and he offered his arms for them to climb onto. A familiar weight settled on his shoulders and head as the python and the unscarred brown snake curled around his neck and into his hair. The scarred little snake remained curled around his right forearm.

“<Were you born with the purple markings in your last life? I quite like them>,” the snake on his head asked.

“<Thank you, little snake>,” he whispered, and he looked back at the corridor. He supposed it could wait for another night. “<Let us take this conversation somewhere else. How do you feel about the Forbidden Forest?>”

“<It is a beautiful night for a forest stroll>,” the python hissed into his ear, and Orochimaru crept through the dark halls of the castle, retracing his steps back to the courtyards that faced the forest. He paused in a hallway overlooking the lake; the moon in its last quarter reflected on the pristine black water, surrounded by the dark forest. He glanced up and down at his snakes.

“<Do you have names?>” he whispered to them.

“<We have none>,” the brown snake on his wrist said, “<We know each other by smell.>”

“<Would you like names?>”

“<It would be an honor to be named by the one who will be Sage>,” the python murmured. Orochimaru looked out of the window and up at the moon. The wind was still, the air was warm, and all was silent in the castle. His gaze swept over the landscape, and he turned his attention back to his snakes, a serene smile on his face.

“<You are Imomeigetsu, the harvest moon>,” Orochimaru said, tapping his finger on the python’s snout, “<The little one in my hair is Koeda, the branch, and the one wrapped around my wrist is Ogawa, the brook.>”

All three of the newly christened snakes hissed in delight and curled a little tighter around him. “<We are honored, young lord. These are words in your first human language, are they not?>” Ogawa asked.

“<Yes, but I think it is spoken in a small country in this world too>,” he whispered to them, slinking back into the shadows of the hallway. He carried them down a flight of stairs and through the maze of corridors, finally reaching one of the outdoor paths that opened out to the forest. Orochimaru dashed across the field, keeping a distance from the little hut with the overgrown pumpkin patch; the lights were on and the chimney was smoking, and he had no desire to draw the resident’s attention. He slipped into the underbrush of the forest, hiding just at the edge of the tree line. Looking back, he saw the silhouette of the castle rise behind him, shimmering ever so slightly with magic. It was nice, but the forest – it beckoned to him. Orochimaru pressed further on into the trees.

(In the little hut on the edge of the grounds, Hagrid was knitting a gigantic purple woolen scarf when he glanced out of the window and saw the ghost of a child running into the forest. He blinked, but the ghost had disappeared.)

“<Now, what were you saying about Pensie not being able to teach me snake magic? How have you been able to speak to her?>” Orochimaru asked as he weaved through the forest. He’d known that Pensie wasn’t able to perform magic anymore, but as far as he knew, there was nothing would’ve stopped her from teaching clan magic. Imomeigetsu circled around his neck, her cool scales shifting smoothly on his skin.

“<We snakes are gossips, we talk to one another constantly, young lord>,” she chuckled, “<If there’s a message you must get back to your nest, we would be glad to have it passed along. We ourselves received one from your nest mother, asking us to teach you our clan magic because – well, she doesn’t know much of it herself.>”

“<How is that possible?>” Orochimaru asked, eyes wide. Snakes that didn’t know their own magic? Koeda looked at him sadly.

“<The snake magic has been dying out for a very long time, since the last Sage disappeared. We are not nearly as prosperous as we were centuries ago. All many of us have these days are the tales of old. It is rare even for a snake to know your human magic, as Pensie does. Perhaps she thought that maybe the basilisk could teach you, but Her Highness has been asleep for decades now, and she won’t wake unless...>”

Orochimaru looked up, even though he could not see the snake on his head. “<A basilisk? At Hogwarts? Where? Unless what?>”

“<She sleeps in the bowels of the castle, but she will only awaken for an heir of Slytherin. Her Highness was raised by Salazar Slytherin himself>,” Ogawa said hesitantly. Orochimaru stopped walking – he barely registered that it was almost pitch black this deep in the forest, the moon completely blocked by the clouds and trees. 

“<I’m sure she can be convinced otherwise>,” he thought aloud. Finding the great snake would be for another night. So many _secrets_ to discover in Hogwarts, it seemed. “<But why didn’t Pensie tell me anything about this?>”

“<It is a great source of shame for her, to be an elder of our clan and yet to not know our most sacred arts>,” Imomeigetsu said, “<She did not want to lose face in front of you, young lord. Please forgive her.>” Orochimaru nodded slightly, but his mouth was pulled tight.

“<I would never hold that against her>,” he whispered. Pensie was the closest thing he’d ever had for a mother in this life; he could never fault her for not having the opportunity to learn.

“<So I take it that you do not know the clan magic either?>” he asked, but the snakes shook their heads.

“<The castle snakes are novices compared to the basilisk and the masters of old, but we know bits and pieces>,” Koeda said, slithering down from her perch to look right into Orochimaru’s yellow eyes, “<And the snakes of the forest know a little more.>”

From all around him, Orochimaru heard the quiet hisses of the unseen snakes that had gathered around him during his trek into the woods. A single white snake – _Blanche_ , he first thought, but this one had green eyes instead of red – curled around his feet and looked up at him.

“<What would you like to learn first?>” it asked him.

The clouds broke, and a sliver of moonlight broken through the trees, illuminating a single golden slit pupil eye ringed in a poisonous purple. 

“<Everything.>”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Orochimaru: teach me or I will cause problems on purpose  
> Also Orochimaru, an 11-year-old child: I will name this snake Potato Moon  
> Nerefors – made up spell name for the match-to-needle Transfguration spell. Wikitionnary says that “nere” is one of the Latin (?) relatives of the English word “needle”.
> 
> This chapter was tough to write out until it was something I was kind of happy with, and I might revisit it in the future so it’s more “show” and not “tell”, but *jazz hands* here it is for now.  
> As always, thank you to everyone who comments, bookmarks and leaves kudos! Due to real life obligations, next chapter will be up next month a week later than usual, on the 18th.


	6. Chapter 6

“You look like rubbish, Potter, did you read all of your textbooks last night?” Malfoy scoffed as he primly took a seat next to Potter in the Charms classroom, right at the front of the Ravenclaw side of the high benches. Orochimaru rubbed at his eyes with the heel of his palm – he’d spent longer in the forest than he’d planned and managed to creep back into the tower for about three hours of sleep before the prefect woke them up _again_. Worse still, for some reason the kitchen elves were on strict orders to not serve anything caffeinated to students (at least, not until exam season, or so an upperclassman had said dejectedly). He’d been tempted to chuck the sorry excuse they called decaf right out the window. 

“Good morning, Slytherin,” he grumbled, “Why are you following me?”

“It’s Draco Malfoy, I’ll have you know,” Malfoy corrected, “Rumor has it you’re the genius of the lot. I wanted to confirm it for myself.”

Orochimaru glanced at Malfoy painfully with dry eyes, and then at the Ravenclaws filling in the seats around them. Once again, they looked unhappy to see Malfoy there. _Whatever_ , he thought. 

“Suit yourself,” he said, just as the bell rang. Professor Flitwick stepped out from behind his desk right on time and levitated himself onto the stack of gigantic tomes that served as his lecture pedestal. He started right into the the first Charms student of every Hogwarts student: the lesson on the ubiquitous Wingardium Leviosa. Orochimaru listened to it half-asleep – he’d had years to practice this charm already, and his attention was only piqued when Flitwick levitated white goose feathers in front of each student.

“Now for a practical! I want you to practice the Levitating Charm on the feathers on your benches. Go on, give it a try, just like I showed you. Swish and flick, Wingardium Leviosa,” he said. Everyone but Orochimaru immediately drew their wands and started chanting. Instead, he watched Malfoy take his wand out of his robes with snobby elegance.

“Wingardium Leviosa,” Malfoy said with a pretentious flick of his wand held delicately in his hand, and the feather zipped up a few inches before floating back down. His eyebrows furrowed in annoyance.

“Very good, Mr. Malfoy! Excellent pronunciation and wand movement! Now, try to keep the feather up in the air for a small time,” Flitwick said. Malfoy scowled, but he saw that Orochimaru hadn’t even bothered to draw his wand. “What’s the matter, Potter, is this too difficult for you?”

Orochimaru moved his gaze back to his own feather. He could probably cast the charm without a word or even moving his hand, but Flitwick expected the proper wandwork. He sluggishly drew his wand and moved his wand exactly as Flitwick had done, chanting the charm exactly as Flitwick had, feeling the precious little energy he had seep out of his hands, through the wand, and meld the magic around the feather. It quickly glided up and up into the air with no hesitation, hovering several feet in the air, only wobbling occasionally in time with Orochimaru’s yawns. _So much extra work for the same result_ , he thought.

“Well done, Mr. Potter!” Flitwick beamed. Orochimaru nodded his head, too tired to do much but mutter a thanks.

“Are you assuaged, Malfoy?” Orochimaru asked with a yawn. He didn’t need to open his eyes to see the jealousy on the other boy’s face.

“Rotten genius,” Malfoy grumbled.

“I know, how terrible,” Orochimaru said sarcastically, glancing at Malfoy. The boy sounded like he didn’t care, but his face was plain as day – Malfoy kept on looking between Orochimaru and the feather hovering higher and higher into the air, curiosity in his eyes.

“Let’s make a deal. I tell you how to make the charm work, and at some point in the future I get to call in a favor from you,” he said smoothly. Malfoy narrowed his eyes in suspicion.

“Would you help a Ravenclaw for free?”

“If I liked them enough,” Orochimaru said with a shrug. Malfoy grumbled, but he nodded his head.

“Fine. I accept your conditions, Potter.”

“Wonderful,” Orochimaru droned, “You’re expending too much energy trying to get the feather up in the first place, and your concentration breaks once you run out of energy. Go slower.” He pointed at Malfoy’s feather with his non-wand hand and flicked up. The feather launched into the air, but immediately came back down. 

“Wait, what? What energy? It’s magic,” Malfoy scoffed, like that explained everything.

“Magic still requires you to _think_ ,” Orochimaru groaned, shaking his head, “Like I said, go slower. Imagine you’re trying to keep the feather afloat with your own breath.”

Malfoy scowled at him again, disbelieving, but he tried the Charm again, with more restraint in his movement. The feather didn’t rise nearly as high, but it stayed in the air longer, before eventually falling back down.

“That was harder,” he complained.

“It just requires practice,” Orochimaru said with a slow shrug. He flicked his own wand, and his own feather fell closer to him, still wobbling. It was taking too much energy to keep the feather up so high; he really was ready to pass out.

“And what makes you so special?” Malfoy sneered, even as he flicked his wand again and muttered another charm under his breath.

“Everything. Good night,” Orochimaru yawned, and with the last little bit of consciousness he could maintain he slumped forward in his seat, fast asleep and dead to the world in seconds. His feather followed him, drifting down slowly and landing on his head. 

When the bell rang, Orochimaru jolted awake, knocking away the small pile of feathers that had accumulated on his head. He looked across the room and found not a single feather on anyone else’s bench. He absently ran a hand through his hair, catching a few of them between his fingers. 

“Was it good practice for them?” he asked Flitwick, who gave him a bashful smile.

“Yes, and a little bit of harmless fun, Mr. Potter. My sincerest apologies if you’re offended.”

“Not at all, Professor,” he said as he flicked his hand at the masses of feathers that surrounded him, levitating them back to Flitwick’s desk. Now if they had been practicing on more dangerous objects, then Orochimaru himself might’ve had some fun. He never was a light sleeper, even when he was exhausted.

“You’ll have to ask your peers what the homework is for next class, since you missed that,” Flitwick said. Orochimaru sighed dramatically, like it was some great inconvenience, but he could already see Boot out of the corner of his eye subtly trying to wave him down. He didn’t feel that Flitwick was one of those teachers that was unnecessarily strict for the sake of it – perhaps he’d stay a little more awake next class.

“I’m right here, you could get the homework from me, Potter,” Malfoy said with a smirk, like he was absolutely going to give Orochimaru the wrong answer.

 _Sage on high, he couldn’t lie to save his life_ , Orochimaru internally groaned, but he just rolled his eyes and brushed him off, gathering his supplies and gliding over to a cheery Boot who was more than happy to tell him the homework. He could feel Malfoy’s eyes bore into the back of his head, but that was nothing new, and easy to ignore.

“How are you spending your break before flying class, Potter?” Boot asked as they left the classroom “I’m headed back to the dorm, want to come with?”

“I think I might sleep through the rest of the day if I get anywhere near my bed,” he said through a yawn, “You head back, I’m going to get more food from the kitchens. Maybe they’ll even give me coffee.”

“Ha! Good luck with that,” Boot laughed, but he waved to Orochimaru and scampered down the hall towards Ravenclaw Tower, thoroughly convinced that his kind-of-friend be bargaining for banned drinks. But Orochimaru had other plans. He slipped among the crowd of students that walked the halls, most on the way to class or back to the dorms, but among the black robes and curious eyes he caught sight of a sliver of scales slinking into a hole in the stone walls, a faint hissing whisper guiding him through the thinning crowds. In a few minutes, he found himself in an empty hallway, and Koeda slithered out from under a wooden door, peering up at Orochimaru with one slit eye.

“<Good morning, Young Lord. How are you feeling? We’re sorry for keeping you up so late last night>,” he asked as he curled up Orochimaru’s outstretched arm and into his robes.

“<An easy price to pay for knowledge. Nothing I haven’t done before>,” he hummed, tapping Koeda’s snout as it peeked out of the collar of his robes. The snake retreated into the fabric just as two identical boys with Ron’s red hair and freckles ran past him. One of them glanced back at him, but the other just grabbed his wrist and dragged him away, clearly much more frantic about getting to class on time.

 _Those must be some of his famous brothers_ , Orochimaru thought, watching them dash off as the bell tolled for the next period of class. The twins, he remembered, and apparently the school pranksters if Ron was telling the truth about their misadventures. He silently hoped to avoid being in the crosshairs of their tomfoolery.

“<Is it safe?>” a muffled hiss came from his robe. Orochimaru opened his mouth, but he closed it shut and instead closed his eyes.

“<Let’s find out>” he whispered, and he felt the magic that _lived_ and _writhed_ all around him suddenly wrap around his face, drowning his lungs. This was no human magic – most humans channeled energy out through a wand or from their bodies and controlled the magic simply as a force. What the snakes understood – had understood long before humans had a word for magic, before they forgot _where_ the magic came from – was that everything was magic. There was no border between magical and mundane until the humans said it so, only nature in all its chaos. The snakes did not use magic to control nature, but rather to converse with it, and to persuade it to shape themselves to their own liking.

Orochimaru gasped as his breath returned, and his nostrils aflame with the scent of the inhabitants of the school. His newly heightened sense of smell did not wrinkle his nostrils with the approaching scent of human, just the fading trails of the Weasley twins, mixed with the scents of rats, toads, bats, dog, troll, and snakes all around them. How many things lived in these walls that its human inhabitants never saw?

“<Young Lord has mastered our sense magic already? We may need to find the basilisk very soon>,” Koeda murmured as he poked his head out of the collar again, this time wrapping around Orochimaru’s neck loosely like a living choker. “<A Sage in my lifetime…is this what it was like long ago?>”

“<I wouldn’t know. Sages seem to operate differently than what I’m used to. But I would like to talk to the basilisk myself>,” Orochimaru said as he jogged through the hall, following the heavy stench of snake. Ancient, old, musty, but heavy with power – it could only be the basilisk. It took them right outside a girls’ lavatory on the second floor, but Orochimaru stopped when he heard crying coming from inside.

“<Oh, Moaning Myrtle’s having her hourly sob>,” Koeda scoffed, “<Hopefully she’s not in the stall with the trap door.>”

“<Moaning Myrtle?>” Orochimaru asked.

“<School ghost. She died here.>”

 _Another mystery for another time, then_ , Orochimaru thought as he crept into the bathroom, drawing his wand. He didn’t know if magic worked on ghosts, but it was better to have it in the off chance it did. The bathroom itself was surprisingly clean, and he could hear Myrtle’s sobs coming from the last stall on the right, just in front the large bath in the back of the room. Luckily, the basilisk’s scent veered in the other direction towards the sinks. Orochimaru silently walked to the faucets, and smirked when he saw the snake head faucet.

“<So it should open - >,” he started when the faucet slowly slid into the floor with a load metal groan, revealing a small dark tunnel heading downwards into the castle. The sobbing behind him stopped suddenly, and he dashed into the tunnel before he thought Myrtle would see him. It was pitch black in the tunnel, but he headed onwards, tracking by scent only. The tunnel was small and damp, but it led to a large stone cavern, where a great metal door engraved with the sculpture of a seven headed snake was closed shut.

“<…open?>” Orochimaru said with trepidation. Immediately, the door began to swing open. Orochimaru held his hands in his face as he backed away, embarrassed on the basilisk’s behalf on the “security” of the cavern. Whoever built this place may as well have left the entrance unlocked. He climbed into the flooded cavern lit from above by green glowing stalactites, striding past the giant stone sculptures of snake heads lashing out at each other. At the end, the gaunt sculpture of a bearded man stared back, his mouth opening to unending darkness.

“<Who’s that?>” Orochimaru asked, staring up at the holes where the man’s eyes would’ve been.

“<Salazar Slytherin. We are in his Chamber of Secrets>,” Koeda hissed, uncurling from Orochimaru’s neck and slipping down to the smooth, wet stone. 

“<What did he have to hide?>”

“<Her Highness. The only human to know she is here is the one who awoke her years ago.>”

“<A thousand years, and no one on staff figured out the largest snake known to man was down here?>” Orochimaru sighed, shaking his head. He pointed up at Slytherin’s stone visage. “<And this is just narcissistic. I never understood why people wanted to carve their faces into rock walls.>”

“<He was a proud man and a prouder wizard>,” Koeda said, slithering closer to the literal mouth of the cave. Orochimaru could tell the basilisk’s scent went further into the cave, but who knew how far it went. He’d rather not get lost and be late for class.

“<Perhaps he was too proud, if this is what the snakes are now>,” he said as he knelt down onto the wet stone and let Koeda slither back up his arm. “<Let’s go, I don’t want to be late for class>.”

“<What will you be studying?>”

“<Flying, apparently.>”

“<Can I come with you?>” Koeda squealed, “<I’ve always wanted to know what flying is like!>”

“<Of course>,” Orochimaru said, letting the small snake nudge its snout into his cheek in affection.

As they turned back from Slytherin’s looming gaze and walked out of the Chamber, something deep in the cavern of Salazar Slytherin’s mouth shifted.

\---

“Harry, how is your robe damp?” Hermione asked when she accosted Orochimaru on their way to their first flying lessons. She wiped a hand on his shoulder, twisting her face in disgust when it came back wet. She wiped the mildew residue on the back of Ron’s robes, who squawked at the sudden cold.

“Eugh, nasty! What’d you do that for?” he yelped at her.

“I’m not getting _my_ robes dirty,” she huffed, and she looked back at Harry, fully dedicated to interrogating him. “You still haven’t answered my question, Harry.”

“I went exploring,” he said, brushing a hand over the front of his robes. They did come back rather wet and slightly green, much to his own disgust, and he pulled out his wand and waved it while pointing to himself. The fabric began to steam a little bit, but he sighed as he felt the fabric dry out. Koeda wriggled on his right arm in his robe sleeve, hissing happily underneath the welcome heat. He did the same little swirl with his wand pointed towards Ron as well, and a small spot on the back of the boy’s robes robes steamed and straightened out.

“Thanks, mate,” Ron said, twisting to try to get a look at the back of his robes. He also almost walked into the side of the entrance out to the field where the first-year Gryffindors and Ravenclaws were lining up in front of Madam Hooch, red and gold on her left and blue and bronze on her right. Orochimaru tugged him away just in time to stop the redhead from concussing himself, but it was Ron who all but dragged Orochimaru and Hermione when he saw the brooms. Orochimaru smiled a little at the boy’s enthusiasm, but it faded when Hooch gave him a stern look when he stood by Hermione. She clearly expected the two houses to stay separate of each other. He moved to the other side and lined up between Padma Patil and Michael Corner, the former who was doing her best to look indifferent to him, and the latter who openly scowled at him.

Madam Hooch blew into a silver whistle tied around her neck just after the bell tolled. “We will begin flying lessons immediately. First lesson: how to gather your broom. A proper witch or wizard does not bend down to grab it, they command it to come to them. Hold your right hand over your broom, and say ‘Up!’ Go on, chop chop!”

Around Orochimaru, the children began to command their brooms up with varying success. Padma got it in a few tries, and Michael summoned it on the first try, but across from him it looked like Ron and Hermione were having trouble. 

“Up!” Hermione commanded, but the broom just rolled on the ground.

“UP!” Ron shouted, and the broom swung up and smacked him right in the head like he’d stepped on a rake. Orochimaru winced in sympathy, and he looked down to his own broom. He reached out.

“Up,” he said firmly, but the broom didn’t move. Michael Corner snorted at him.

“Up!” he said a little louder, and the broom lifted an inch of the ground, but then immediately fell back down and rolled around like it was having a tantrum. Orochimaru’s eyebrow twitched. For some reason, he thought of that one time he’d found Kabuto hiding in one of the test subject dorm rooms after the boy had accidentally poured an old pot of tea down a sink that also happened to have a petri dish of Hashirama cells and Orochimaru had come back from a bathroom break to find a week’s worth of research literally down the drain –

“ **Up** ,” he commanded, cold as the arctic wind, and the broom smacked into his palm. He grasped the worn, splintered wood firmly, and it did not tremble in his grip – _good_ , he thought with a menacing grin. Coincidentally, the brooms that had been refusing to go into the rest of his classmates’ hands suddenly shot up to them – Hermione almost fell backwards from the sheer force with which her broom had shot up to her. Padma took a step away from Orochimaru, clearly understanding what had happened, but no one else registered the reason for the sudden shiver they all felt. If Madam Hooch felt it, she didn’t let on to her students, and instead powered through the lesson.

“Good. Next lesson: how to mount your broom. Straddle it, and hold it tight. Right hand over left, thumb in, not out. The most common injuries in Quidditch players after Bludger hits are broken fingers from a bad grip during a collision. Now, once you’ve mounted your broom, I want you to practice _hovering_ , not full-on flying. Kick off, hold steady for a few seconds, then tip forwards while you come ba – “

And just like that, a boy from the Gryffindors shot up into the air, jerking and swaying on his broom. Orochimaru squinted his eyes – it was Neville, swaying on his broom and crying for help. 

“Mr. Longbottom!” Hooch screeched, but the boy was jerked around by the broom as it flew out of control like a wild horse. He screamed as it zipped around and flew low close to the ground, right at the crowd of students that was diving out of his way. All except Orochimaru, who it was headed straight for.

“Harry!” Ron and Hermione yelled.

“Potter! Get out of his way!” Hooch yelled, hopping onto her own broom. _She won’t get here in time_ , Orochimaru thought, and who knew what the broom would do even if he dodged. Wild animals were unpredictable at the best of times.

Orochimaru held his ground, his left arm outstretched at the quickly advancing Neville. He dug his feet into the ground, sinking pseudochakra down through his soles as he prepared to catch the boy. Neville slammed into his arm hard, and Orochimaru skidded backwards, holding Neville down for maybe a second. But Neville was going too fast, and Orochimaru’s arm would be torn off if he tried to stop the boy and stay on the ground. Instead, he quickly anchored his arm around Neville’s waist and let himself be launched into the air with the boy, mounting his own broom in mid-air.

“Neville! Calm down!” he growled, but the boy’s eyes were unfocused and he was blubbering nonsense. _Is he having a medical emergency?_ Orochimaru thought with a small amount of panic. He tightened his grip on his own broom and leaned forward, flying in the opposite direction to try to slow Neville down, but the boy was speeding along like a bull.

“Longbottom!” he yelled, but the boy didn’t register it as they jerked violently in the air. Orochimaru looked behind him at where they were going – right into a tower in the next few seconds, apparently. Not keen on becoming Hogwarts’ latest wall décor, he took a deep breath. He pooled pseudochakra on the hand clutching at Neville’s torso, and –

“Kai!” he whispered as he forced the chakra into the boy’s nervous system, and he felt the boy shiver and jolt. Orochimaru looked up at Neville and let out a breath of relief when the boy’s eyes were clear again. More importantly, they were slowing down; Orochimaru leaned forward and flew in the opposite direction, and the pair of them finally stopped to a standstill just a few feet in front of a window. Orochimaru looked back – they had stopped right in front of McGonagall’s classroom, apparently, in the middle of a lesson with some older Slytherins and Hufflepuffs who were gawking at them. He took his right hand off his broom and waved at them, before looking back at Neville.

“Neville? Can you hear me? Do you understand what I’m saying?” he said quietly to the shivering boy. Neville looked at him with terrified eyes.

“I-I-I – “ he stuttered, but his eyes dropped down to the ground far below them, and Orochimaru cursed under his breath as the boy fainted and slipped out of his grasp, plummeting to the ground, broom and all.

“No!” Orochimaru hissed, diving towards Neville. His ears rang as he stretched his hands out and barely caught Neville’s hands in his own, just halfway down the tower, but the sudden weight threw him off balance, and he was rotating off his own broom. He hung upside down like a sloth, his own broom thankfully hovering in midair. Neville’s broom met a less desirable fate, crashing down onto the lawn and breaking in half upon impact.

“<I don’t think this is what I had in mind when I asked you to show me flying>,” Koeda hissed meekly as he slithered under Orochimaru’s shirt sleeves. His robe was hanging down, and the snake did not want to reveal himself.

“<Noted. Let’s try again next week?>,” Orochimaru sighed, but he kept his mouth shut when he saw a group of teachers being led by the headmaster running over to them. Just in time too, because it was very difficult to keep his legs wrapped around a short, slightly moving broomstick.

“Potter!” McGonagall shouted from high above in her tower.

“We’re alright, Professor!” he shouted back up at her, but he paused to think about what he had just said. 

“I’m alright!” he corrected. He really wasn’t sure if Neville was okay. He saw Madam Pomfrey and Madam Hooch mount brooms and fly up to them.

“My word, Potter, you must have limbs of steel,” Pomfrey said as she cradled Neville and slung him onto her broom, freeing Orochimaru to let go of the other boy’s hands. He grunted as he swung himself up, clutching his head as the blood rushed back down his body. 

“Careful with your head, Potter,” Hooch said, wrapping an arm around his shoulders and gently flying them down to the ground. “That was very foolish of you to grab onto him, you know.”

“I thought I couldn’t dodge in time, so I thought I could slow him down instead, but I was wrong,” he groaned. Only now did he realize how hard his heart was pounding.

“Right you are. 50 points from Ravenclaw for misjudging a situation where you placed yourself in grave danger…but 50 points to Ravenclaw for saving a student in need,” she said warmly as they landed. “Don’t do it again, though. Leave the danger to adults, okay?”

“Yes, Madam,” he said, swaying a little when he stood up. The earth was solid beneath his feet, a very welcome feeling. He was escorted to Pomfrey and Dumbledore, who was levitating Neville onto a stretcher.

“Any pain or discomfort, Mr. Potter? How do you ears and head feel? Would you like to rest in the infirmary?” Pomfrey asked him.

“No pain of any sort, and the vertigo is fading. If it’s alright with you, Madam, I’d like to rest outdoors for the remainder of the period,” he asked, looking between Hooch and Pomfrey. Pomfrey nodded at her colleague, who summoned her broom and the remain of Neville’s.

“You’ll be with me on the ground for the rest of the period then,” Hooch said, “After me, Potter.”

Orochimaru followed right in step behind her, but they were stopped by the headmaster who glanced at him with fondness. He whispered something into Hooch’s ear, and she startled a little. Orochimaru didn’t hear what the headmaster said, but he thought that maybe he saw tears welling up in Hooch’s eyes. She nodded at the headmaster, pulling her face back into her stern demeanor, and continued marching back through the castle towards the practice field, Orochimaru following dutifully behind her. 

“Mr. Potter, we’ll be taking a small detour,” Hooch said softly as they turned down a small candlelit corridor. Orochimaru peeked out from behind her curiously, catching sight of a glass trophy case. Hooch stopped right in front of it, looking wistfully at the shelves of golden trophies and plaques. She beckoned him closer, pointing at a small wooden plaque with a list of names under a golden and scarlet sculpture of a lion. 

**_Distinguished Players, Gryffindor (1970 – 1979)_ **

_Terrence Jeanes, Seeker, 1970 – 1972_

_Sissy O’Connor, Chaser, 1973_

_Monday Addams, Beater, 1974_

_Tuesday Addams, Beater, 1975_

_Doretta Darkwood, Beater, 1976_

_Harwood Harden, Seeker, 1977_

_James Potter, Chaser, 1978_

_Cleo El-Hashem, Chaser, 1979_

Orochimaru paused at the second to last name. 

“Your father was the best Chaser on the Gryffindor team when he was a boy,” Madam Hooch said wistfully. “One of the best that I’ve seen in all the years I’ve been teaching at Hogwarts. When I saw you flying, trying to slow Longbottom down, it was like a vision from the past.”

She turned to Orochimaru. “Let me be clear, I don’t want to force you to join your Quidditch team just because your father was on his House’s team. But the headmaster thought that you should know of your father’s legacy here at Hogwarts.”

“…thank you,” Orochimaru whispered. His fingertips pressed against the glass, smudging the clear material, but he didn’t care. Here was a little bit of the father he never truly knew.

Madam Hooch patted his back softly with one hand and wiped the tears from her face with the other.

“Time to head back to class,” she said. Orochimaru nodded and followed behind her, glancing back at the trophy case once with a fleeting glance.

Lunch was a quiet affair for Orochimaru. After the Incident, as many had come to think of it, none of the other first-years bothered him, and even Terry and the prefect were giving him space. Most of the school had heard or seen that little escapade that morning, and while they gave him concerned or amused looks, they didn’t bother him. Orochimaru ate his meal quickly and left the hall in no real hurry, content on wandering the halls again. He ended up leaning over the railings of the second floor above the main stairwell, watching the great inclines move around. Koeda slipped out from the sleeves of his robes and onto the banister, looking down with him. His twin slithered out of the shadows behind them and curled around Orochimaru’s feet.

“<I heard you two went on quite an adventure this morning>,” Ogawa said.

“<Just Slytherin’s hidden room and a high-speed flight around the school>,” Koeda said nonchalantly.

“<And what will you do now, young lord?>” Ogawa asked.

“<I have an appointment at the library>,” Orochimaru said, looking down at the snake.

“<Pensie said that you are a _storyteller_ like her. Would you read to us?>” Koeda asked.

“<If I can find the right time and place. Maybe my bedroom if it’s empty>,” he said with a warm smile. He missed reading to Pensie and Natha, Blanche and Noire, and all the little snakes in the neighbourhood gardens, the little hisses asking him to explain something. “<But first I’ve got to get some books. I’ve been through all of mine twice already.>”

“<We’ll be waiting when you get out. The library witch has some nasty-smelling spells hovering in there>,” Koeda huffed. Orochimaru guessed they were annoying anti-pest charms, as if _anyone_ could consider a snake a pest. He scratched the chins of the twin snakes and hurried to the library.

“Harry!” Cho said, walking up to him from the other end of the hall, exactly on time as well. She grabbed his face, turning him side to side, checking his head for any injuries. “Are you feeling alright? I saw you flying around the school like a rocket!”

“I’m fine,” Orochimaru said, lightly shaking off Cho’s grip.

“If you say so,” she said with concern. “Anyways, let’s go explore the library!” she beamed, grabbing Orochimaru’s hand and pulling him into the room. His eyes widened and he couldn’t stop himself from grinning when they walked into the candle-lit room packed with shelves and shelves of books that stretched to the high cathedral-like ceiling.

“Knew you’d love it,” Cho said, only to be shushed with a hiss by the sharp faced witch sitting at the beautiful mahogany counter by the entrance. Cho winced and led Orochimaru further into the library, away from the formidable Madam Pince.

“She’s got ears like a bat,” Cho whispered into his ear with a giggle. Orochimaru nodded, not taking his eyes off the rows of shelves on subjects that he’d never even heard of. He picked books off the shelves feverishly as Cho walked him around the room, and soon he was carrying a stack of books up to his eyebrows.

“Give me some of those Harry, that’s got to be awfully heavy,” she said as she took the top half of the stack from him into her own hands, peering at the top book. “’1001 Magical Uses For Mundane Herbs and Spices’? Are you planning on becoming a chef?”

Orochimaru shrugged. “It looked interesting,” he said, picking yet another book off the shelf. This one was a worn leatherback tome, a silver plate stuck to the front with the engraving _Mythes & Magicks_ etched into it. He inspected it quickly, then placed it on the top of his pile and looked up expectantly at Cho. She giggled softly at him and lead him further into the library. Her arms were starting to get sore when the pair of them almost bumped into another pair of students carrying equally as tall piles of books in their arms.

“Pardon us!” Hermione whispered, swerving out of Cho’s way just in time. “Oh, Harry, are you feeling better?”

“Please save me,” a miserable Ron groaned quietly from behind his own pile of books, “She dragged me here and won’t let me go.”

“Nonsense, Ron, we’ve got to study for our classes!” Hermione said.

“It’s the _second_ day!” Ron whined.

“Early bird catches the worm,” Hermione said to him, but she perked up when she noticed that Orochimaru wasn’t alone. “Wait, who’s this, Harry?”

“Cho Chang. One of my upperclassmen. She’s very nice,” Orochimaru said sincerely. Cho’s face flushed a little.

“Yes, I’m nice enough to make sure your arms don’t fall off,” she said as she gently rested her stack of books on a nearby study table.

“Think of it as weight training,” he said.

“For Quidditch? That’s a good idea, actually,” Cho mused.

“You’re on the Quidditch team?” Ron asked her, his interest piqued.

“No, but I want to be,” she said, “Do you follow the League? Who’s your favorite team?”

“Chudley Cannons!” Ron beamed.

“Wow, I’ve never actually met a Cannons fan,” Cho admitted, resting one arm and leaning against the surprisingly sturdy stack of books, “That’s a brave pick, I’m impressed.”

“That’s not what most people say. Harry’s right, you’re cool,” Ron said, but his face paled as a shadow loomed over the four of them.

“No talking in the library!” Madam Pince said sternly, and Ron, Hermione, and Cho scrambled to get their books and head somewhere else. Orochimaru stood his ground instead; he’d been wanting to ask her a question for a while now.

“Madam Pince, why are those books restricted?” he said, pointing to a small, gloomy section in the back of the library cordoned off with velvet crowd dividers and a small wooden sign with the word “Restricted” carved in elegant cursive script.

“They’re not appropriate for the younger students such as yourselves,” she snapped.

“And how may one gain access to the restricted section?” he asked.

“With a teacher’s note, but first years are not given any assignments that would require perusal of such delicate material,” she scoffed.

Orochimaru looked back at the ever-so-inviting Restricted section. What part of “making something forbidden only makes people want it more” did these teachers not understand? He feigned mild disappointment and turned back at the librarian.

“I understand. May I check out some books instead?” he asked.

Madam Pince’s eyebrow twitched. She had a bad feeling about this one.

\---

It took some tricky maneuvering, but with Cho’s help, Orochimaru managed to get his small, eclectic collection of library books back into his dorm. Surrounding his bed were the uneven piles of books he’d unpacked from his trunk, but right by the head of his bed were two perfect piles of library books, away from any damaging light or water. Madam Pince had been _very_ clear what would happen if any of her precious books were damaged or desecrated in any way.

He was all alone in the first-year boys’ bedroom, as he expected. Last he saw, the other boys were down in the common room talking and joking around, playing a card game. He didn’t expect them to come back up for the rest of the day.

“<I was told there would be stories?>” Imomeigetsu said as she slithered out from under Orochimaru’s bed.

“<Most of these are reference books, but there can be stories in them too>,” he said, curling up on his bed and grabbing the top book from the closer of the two perfect piles of library books. _An Absolute History of Alchemy_ , by Iudocus the Golden, the hard blue cover intricately designed with a beautiful golden geometric pattern. He opened the book to the first page, letting Imomeigetsu curl up in his lap.

“<You would share your human magics and histories with us?>” Ogawa asked, he and his twin slithering up the bed behind Imomeigetsu and nestling beside the python. “<Even the pretender did not do that.>”

“<It is all nature, is it not? Our magic is not all that different, merely the understanding of how it works>,” Orochimaru said, “<It is a shame that the snakes have been left blind to it all these centuries.>”

And so Orochimaru started to fix that that afternoon, and well into the night, as he read the book aloud to his snakes. When the rest of the boys started trickling back in to the bedroom for the night, they found the boy they knew as Harry Potter sound asleep in his bed, no snakes to be seen, with two piles of books perfectly stacked by his bed, and one book on his nightstand open to page 254 of Iudocus’s greatest work.

\---

254

_The Philosopher’s Stone is the culmination of centuries of alchemical research, yet only twice in recorded history has it been known to have been created. The first Stone was made by wizards in the court of King Xerxes of the Persian Empire in 466 B.C., but it vanished after the king’s assassination in 465 B.C. It has never been found. The second Stone was created by the French wizard Nicolas Flamel in 1393. Mr. Flamel uses the Stone as an ingredient in his Elixir of Life, which he has used to extend his and his wife’s lives far beyond the average life expectancy. The Flamels live a hermetic life somewhere in Europe, having secluded themselves from society after being targeted during Gellert Grindelwald’s rebellion in the early 20 th century, and are nowadays rarely seen in public society. _

_There has been much speculation as to where the first Stone has gone. Some theorize that there has been only one Stone, that Mr. Flamel came into possession of Xerxes’ Stone, but the author has had the privilege of meeting Mr. Flamel, and can say without a doubt that Mr. Flamel is surely the greatest alchemist of all time. There can be no question that Mr. Flamel created a Philosopher’s Stone. Others believe that it was destroyed by the very wizards who made it once their king was murdered, although that then beggars the question of how one may **destroy** the Stone, which then raises an even more pertinent question: how one may **create** a Philosopher’s Stone, for who would not want infinite riches and immortality?_

_The records surrounding the creation of the first Stone are almost nonexistent – we only know of this Stone’s existence through the records of the man only know as Abdolreza the Archivist. The famed Wizarding scribe of King Xerxes’ court describes only a “dark jewel, though faintly scarlet, not unlike an unpolished ruby just out of the ground, which drew my fellow Wizarding courtiers to near madness in the decades they spent trying to create the illustrious Stone that can turn any metal to gold, turn death into life, turn man into a god. But the euphoria when they presented the Stone to the King drove the years from their faces, and it was as if they had become youths again. The kingdom celebrated as if there were a new King that day!”. Given the veracity of the bulk of Abdolreza’s writings on other matters, the author is loath to dismiss this passage despite a lack of contemporary sources to back up the great scribe’s claims. Therefore, as most of Wizarding society does, the author believes that Xerxes’ Stone did exist at one point in history._

_As for the second Stone, Mr. Flamel too has not been keen on revealing his secrets for the past half millennium. Many who have tried to fight him for the knowledge have perished under his wand, sword, or firearm, as Mr. Flamel is a renowned duelist in multiple ways of battle. All he has said on how he came to possess the Stone is this single phrase that he proclaimed to the French Wizard’s Council upon the Stone's creation:_

_“To know the root of all magic, how wonderful!”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *crawls out of the rubble of the past month* I lived b*tch
> 
> Setting up a few things with this chapter, don't mind me ;)
> 
> Now that the year is finally coming to a close and I have a lot more free time starting literally right now as I'm writing this, I think I might speed up my release schedule. Next chapter will be out by January 18. Also, I'll be participating in [Naruto AU Week](https://naruto-au-week.tumblr.com/) in February!
> 
> Thanks to everyone who's commented, bookmarked, or kudos'd this work! I love seeing you all interact with this fic.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> EDIT FEB 1 2021: Too much lore, not enough brain cells. Corrected the Care of Magical Creatures professor to Kettleburn.

Orochimaru first heard the tales about the White Ghost during breakfast on a Monday morning a few weeks into the school term.

“It was ten feet tall, dressed in a robe white as snow - “ Fred Weasley proclaimed to his rapt Gryffindor audience, jumping out of his seat at the Gryffindor table.

“A voice like nails on a chalkboard - “ George included, holding his arms together and shivering.

“Threatened to sacrifice us, it did - “

“Something about summoning the old god Baphomet, chased us around all night - “

“Got away in the nick of time, always good to have a little salt on you for warding off those spirits - “

“Special kind of salt though, Spectre Spooking Salt we call it, manufactured by yours truly - “

“Patent pending, of course - “

Orochimaru watched the twins perform their tale/advertisement, sipping from his mug of breakfast tea. The prefect sat next to him shook his head.

“I will never understand why they do what they do,” he sighed.

“Do you think their salt actually works, or is it just colored flaky salt?” Orochimaru asked, watching the twins show off small burlap sacks of tiny red and blue crystals.

“Knowing them, probably,” the prefect grumbled, “At least it’s not their Giggling Glitter. That was a _pain_ to clean up from the lavatory.”

Orochimaru hummed. He took another drink from his mug, hiding the smile on his face as he remembered what had actually happened last night.

_It had been a humid night, but slightly cool in that way that brings an unpleasant chill that sticks to the skin. Orochimaru tied his hair back into a bun as he watched the two boys from the back of Filch’s office. The Weasley twins were shoulder to shoulder, snickering to each other and taking all sorts of trinkets out of the pockets of the robes they wore over their plaid pyjamas. He’d seen them lure the man away from his office quite effectively with well-timed suspicious sounds around corners and a bewitched cauldron that was probably floating and shrieking down the second floor corridor. By shinobi standards they were amateur at best, but he had trained many students with less experience. These two had potential._

“ _Where’s Filch now?” George asked his brother. Fred pulled out a piece of yellowed parchment from his robes, tapped it with his wand with a whisper under his breath, and unfurled it to reveal the lines of ink drawing themselves into existence._

“ _Damn, he’s running back here - “ Fred started, but he paused when he read not two, but three names in the room they were in. He turned to look at the back of the office where someone should’ve been, but he only saw mildew and damp stone in the candlelight._

“ _What’s it, what’s the matter?” his brother asked, leaning over to read the map. His face paled as he realized what Fred had both seen and not seen. On the Marauder’s Map, the name stepped closer to them._

“ _That looks like an interesting surveillance tool. It even has the right name for me,” a voice said too close to the twins. They jumped back from each other, hitting the stone walls hard. Fred looked down at his hands and realized the Map was out of his hands. He looked up and saw cold, bloodless hands holding it instead, a head of tied-back black hair and yellow snake eyes studying it with curiosity._

“ _Who are you?” George asked with a shake in his voice, pulling out his wand and pointing it at Orochimaru. The boy rolled his eyes, held up the parchment, and tapped on his name._

“ _I don’t know how to pronounce those characters,” George said._

“ _Then you’ll have to learn. There are plenty of foreign language books in the library,” Orochimaru said, folding up the parchment and tucking it inside his yukata._

“ _That’s ours!” Fred whined, but he froze when Orochimaru gave him a cold glare._

“ _I’m borrowing it,” he said, ignoring George’s attempt to sneak up behind him. He sidestepped the boy as he tried to tackle him and caught him by the back of his pyjama collars. Fred jumped up and rushed at him, but he sidestepped the other brother just as easily and caught him the same way. He perked his head up at a sound in the distance and quickly backed up to the back of the office, in the shadow of a dusty bookshelf. Orochimaru hauled the twins up to standing, turning them to face the office door and clamped two freezing hands over their mouths, holding them close._

“ _Don’t move, don’t speak, and he won’t be able to see you,” he whispered to them as he washed pseudochakra over the three of them. They squirmed in his grip instead, but his grip tightened and he hissed at them. The boys stopped struggling just in time, right as Filch slammed open his door, dragging a twitching cauldron behind him._

“ _Students out at night, cauldrons flying about, if I could get my hands on those rotten little clowns,” Filch grumbled as he hobbled into his office. He looked around the office, eyeing the back of the room. The twins looked at each other frantically, but they didn’t dare to do even so much as fidget. And yet, the man didn’t so much as blink an eye, even when he looked right at where they should’ve been. but after a moment he grumbled and dragged the cauldron in, kicking it behind the rickety wooden chair at the desk. It twitched and squeaked, then stilled. Satisfied, Filch grunted and left his office, slamming the door behind him, jostling some stray papers from the top of the bookshelf that landed right on the trio’s head._

_After a few seconds, the hands on the twins’ mouths dropped away, and Orochimaru pushed them forwards, away from the wall. He recalled the chakra cover, shivering a little at the warmth. He pulled the Map out of his yukata and waved it in the dumbstruck faces of the twins._

“ _You’ll get this back when I’m done studying it,” he said. Fred tried to snatch it out of his hand, but Orochimaru dodged the swipe and tucked it back into his yukata._

“ _Who are you?” Fred asked, but Orochimaru only smiled at him in response. He leaped over the desk, opened the door, and dashed out down the corridor, disappearing into the shadows of the dimly lit corridor in less than a second._

“ _Is it colder in here, or is it just me?” George asked, rubbing his arms._

“ _That’s what you’ve got questions about right now?” Fred asked his brother, “He stole the Map! What are we going to do now?”_

“ _We can talk about that later, after we get out of this office. Seriously, it’s freezing in here.”_

“ _Fair enough, pass me the firecrackers,” Fred sighed, pulling out little red fortune cookie-shaped trinkets and dropping them under the desk. After they’d set up their menagerie of mischief in dear old Filch’s office, they Transfigured the cauldron back into Scabbers (uninjured, of course, they would never let Ron’s precious pet get near Filch without protection charms) and scampered out of the dingy office and back to warm and dry Gryffindor Tower, arguing about how they were going to spin this (White Ghost, human sacrifice, maybe we could get some backers for the prototype) and how they were going to make up for the loss of the Map (Bewitch some frog eyes? Two-way mirrors? Put Scabbers on a leash?). They never noticed the child with yellow snake eyes tailing them from the shadows, his precious snakes curled around his arms and neck._

_\---_

“They said the White Ghost ran after them with a kitchen knife!” Ron said in awe, taking out a teacup from his bag for the day’s Transfiguration class.

“Ridiculous,” Orochimaru scoffed. He slouched in his chair, leaning forward over the back of his chair, raising a disbelieving eyebrow at Ron and Seamus.

“Harry’s right, ghosts don’t run, they float,” Hermione added.

“I didn’t ask you,” Ron sneered at her, but Hermione just rolled her eyes and went back to her Potions essay.

Orochimaru looked between the two of them. He’d noticed the two had been more and more tense over time. “Is everything alright?” he asked.

“Just fine!” they snapped, turning away from each other with scowls on their faces. Orochimaru looked to Seamus, who only shrugged along with him.

“Had something of a row over the weekend,” the boy said, “They’ll get over it.”

Orochimaru nodded. Genin teams, especially new ones, always had some growing pains and boundary breaking to do, but in his experience they tended to resolve themselves. Such was a natural part of growing up and together. He turned back to the front of the classroom as the bell rang – _they’ll work it out on their own,_ he thought, but in the back of his mind he felt a twinge of unease.

\---

“Did you hear? Kettleburn cancelled classes ‘cause of the White Ghost.”

Orochimaru and Hermione looked up from their books and at each other, nestled in soft armchairs with a pile of books a meter and a half high between them, in what they had thought was a quiet, empty corner of the library, their regular reading spot. They craned their necks, turning to the unseen voices behind one of the bookshelves.

“Rutherford, don’t you take that one?”

“Classes aren’t over outright, just the ones in the Forest. It sucks, those were the good ones too. He didn’t tell us why though.”

“Eliott – you know, the Hufflepuff? The one that sits next to Rin in Arithmancy? - he said that he heard him talking to Dumbledore about the centaurs being scared of some ghost from the castle. Something about being an omen of death?”

Orochimaru rolled his eyes. He had a few years and a lot more retraining to do before he would be back on that level of dangerous.

“Yeah, well, that could be any of the ghosts. Don’t see why it has to be the Weasleys’ fake ghost from last Monday.”

“It’s not fake! Eliott said that he heard Kettleburn say the centaurs saw a ghost all in white with evil eyes amassing some sort of Dark army of creatures.”

“Okay, so it’s just a Slytherin then playing with Dark magic. Business as usual, why are you so - “

“A- _hem_ ,” Madam Pince coughed.

A gaggle of Gryffindors shot out from behind the bookshelves and scattered to the winds, and once more Hermione and Orochimaru’s little corner was quiet again. Hermione shook her head and went back to her book. Orochimaru watched Madam Pince walk back to her desk before he pulled out his wand to cast a Tempus. He hissed when he saw the time and shot up from his seat.

“Where are you going?” Hermione asked.

“Lunch. Ron invited me to a picnic by the lake before we go to chess club, would you be interested in joining us?” Orochimaru asked, looking out the window down at the sunny courtyards. The gray figures of students milling about, laying in the grass, playing catch, chatting with each other was rather enticing. Even he was not immune to the draw of perfect weekend weather. But to his mild surprise, Hermione shook her head.

“No, go on without me. I want to get through this book,” she said, lifting the pages closer to her face as if to mask it. Orochimaru glanced back at her and cocked his head to read the title on book spine: A History of Ancient Scandinavian Runes, Years 200-400 CE. _That was a rather dry read even for me_ , he wondered, but if it was fascinating to her, who was he to discourage her? He set his own book down on the pile next to her and gathered his belongings into his brown leather messenger bag.

“Remember to eat,” he said as Hermione curled tighter in her chair, pushing the pages even closer to her face. They’d spent more than a few afternoons reading together and completely forgetting about such basic needs, enraptured in learning more about everything magic. He shouldered his bag and left the library, keeping a brisk pace down the stairs and out to the grounds, heading south to the lake. He quickly spotted a redheaded boy lying on a blanket in the same plaid pattern as the Weasley twins’ pyjamas, nibbling on a cracker. Scabbers was curled up asleep on his chest. Beside him was a worn wicker basket filled with sandwiches, cheeses, and misshaped apples that were both ugly and endearing.

“Hey, Harry,” Ron said with a wave.

“Good afternoon, Ron,” Orochimaru said, taking a seat on the soft blanket and reaching for an apple, green and red and oddly reminiscent of Juugo’s face. He took a bite out of it; sweet and crisp, as he expected. “How are your studies going?”

Ron groaned. “Don’t be such a Ravenclaw, I don’t want to think about that right now. I don’t know how you stay in the library all day.”

“Habit,” Orochimaru said as he took the Potions textbook out of his bag and flipped to the beginning of Snape’s assigned reading for the week. Too much for the average 11-year-old child, but nothing too strenuous for himself – it was review for him at this point. Ron tilted his head up and shook his head.

“Are you still Snape’s personal menace?” he asked.

“Of course,” Orochimaru said with a wide smile. He had yet to ask the professor what exactly his problem was with him, but there was no doubt that it wasn’t any issue with his potionmaking competence, even if he somehow got the stalest, worst quality ingredients out of all of the classes. If he could do world-class research on the unstable income of a missing-nin for a few decades, he could make a perfect Strength Potion with stale Fanged Geraniums. _Petty sabotage won’t work on me_.

Ron frowned. “You’ve got that look on your face again.”

“What look?”

“The one where you look like you’re plotting something evil. Like you’re going to sic an Acromantula on someone, I dunno.”

“Nonsense,” Orochimaru huffed, crossing his arms, “I can’t legally get one until I pass the Care of Magical Creatures O.W.L. in a few years.”

“Hagrid helps out that professor for that class, you know?” Ron said, reaching over to the basket to get a bit of cheddar and popping it into his mouth. “Says the centaurs are anxious about something going into the Forest. ‘Course, everyone thinks it’s the White Ghost.”

Orochimaru feigned surprise. “The White Ghost goes into the Forbidden Forest?”

“Yeah, Hagrid told me he’s seen something like it run into the Forest at night. I think it’s freaked him out a bit.”

“Why do you spend so much time with Hagrid anyways? Isn’t he the groundskeeper?”

“Remember when we were in Flying two weeks ago and my broom went out of control?” Ron asked, excited. Orochimaru nodded, mildly confused.

“I crashed in this huge pumpkin patch by the castle, but Hagrid found me and took me to the infirmary. Turns out I landed in his garden, and my wand fell out of my robes when I crashed, so I went back to get it after class, but it’s such a long walk that I missed the lunch bell, but he was outside and he invited me for lunch, and then - “ Ron shrugged, like that explained everything else. “Now I just hang around with him. He knows tons about magic and creatures, even though he doesn’t do any himself. The Ministry snapped his wand for some reason. Dunno why, he wouldn’t say, but he’s a nice bloke.”

“Interesting,” Orochimaru said. The Ministry usually only snapped wands when someone committed a serious crime, and Hagrid, from the few times he’d seen or met him, seemed like an upright, mostly law-abiding man. Then again, his own looks were rather deceiving. _Another mystery for the list_ , he noted to himself, although this one could probably be easily rectified with some old Prophet articles from the library archives.

“Anyways, Hagrid says there’s a big fight between the centaurs and Dumbledore, since apparently the castle ghosts aren’t supposed to be going into the forest, but since none of the teachers can catch the White Ghost, they can’t get it to stop.”

“I didn’t know you could catch a ghost,” Orochimaru snickered.

“You can’t, you have to get its attention and talk to it since it’s just a human spirit that hasn’t passed on, but no one’s been able to do that except for Fred and George that one time, and it was more like the ghost caught them.”

“What a shame,” Orochimaru said, flipping a page in his textbook and rereading the recipe for Draught of Living Death for the tenth time. He took a bite out of his apple and looked out over the giant lake, its waters shimmering in the sunlight. “How’s Hagrid taking the class cancellation?”

Ron frowned. “He’s not too happy about it. He loves being in nature, you know?”

Orochimaru nodded, smiling to himself. “Yes, I do.”

\---

Later that night, Orochimaru sat on a giant tree stump in the Forbidden Forest, his bare feet dangling inches from the forest floor, and called his snakes to audience.

“<We’re bothering the centaur herd>,” Orochimaru told them.

“<They do tend to tread on us. Would you like us to deal with them permanently?>,” Imomeigetsu said, wrapped around his neck like a scaly scarf. From the underbrush below Orochimaru’s feet, a hundred hisses concurred.

“<Convenient in the short term, but that may cause larger, less solvable problems involving the _government,_ ” Orochimaru said, spitting out the last word like it personally offended him. “<They’ve had to cancel some Care of Magical Creatures lessons, and I do not intend on depriving other students of their own academic experiences. So, I have a proposal for all of you.>”

“<Do tell>,” a hundred curious voices with slit pupil eyes of all colors asked, hidden among the leaves and branches.

Orochimaru smiled and pulled out the Map from inside his yukata. “<How do you feel about dark, hidden chambers?>”

\---

Of course, the introduction of a new school rumor merely slowed down the rumors around “Scary” Potter, but did not stop them. They were most virulent in the other Houses, for in Ravenclaw it was not unusual for young students to be well ahead of their peers in academics, yet the stories of the little magical prodigy trickled up the classes from the first years.

“Scary Potter sits next to Slytherins in class,” the first-year boys confided to their upperclassmen, who knew that no one but Slytherins associated with Slytherins, but didn’t know that a certain Malfoy and company were both ingratiating and grating on Orochimaru’s patience. The boy always managed to find him at least once a day and hassle him about something, but Orochimaru could always boil the message down to “we should be associates so I can use you as leverage for my or more likely my father’s personal gain.” His de facto bodyguards were, to put it lightly, not stimulating company, and Orochimaru wondered who the handsome boy and plain, wildhaired girl in green and silver that watched from a distance and sat across from Malfoy at mealtimes were. They seemed to have a few more brain cells for him to pick at than their Housemates, at least.

“Scary Potter almost fought Snape during class,” the first-year girls whispered, and Cho rolled her eyes and tried to tell her friends that Harry was really quite sweet if you got to know him, but even she had only really known him for a few weeks at maximum, and she hadn’t been there to see and feel the chill of the air when Snape sprung another pop quiz on Orochimaru, one far more difficult than the one on the first day. Isobel Macdougal two rows back from “Mr. Potter” had seen the boy Transfigure the holly twigs in his hand to small knives and back as Snape had pestered him, all while answering each question perfectly, and she promised to never get near him for as long as she physically could. She had whispered to Padma, her lab partner, what she’d seen, and it was recorded in the oral history of Scary Potter for all to hear.

 _Scary Potter isn’t scary yet_ , Orochimaru thought whenever he heard the whispers around corners and behind bookshelves, whispers that stopped abruptly as he walked by them. Whispers that got House points deducted if the boy Ravenclaw prefect heard them, and made him worry more and more until he dragged Orochimaru to sit next to him during dinner, as if that wasn’t the status quo three times a day.

“Potter, how are things going?” the prefect asked him with faux cheer, squeezing the words between the chatter of the latest fraudulent gossip on the White Ghost (now featuring an obscure Quidditch cheating conspiracy!) and fifth-years complaining about O.W.L. prep.

“Quite easily, thank you,” Orochimaru told him, not bothering to look up from the essay he was writing with one hand and shoveling food into his mouth with the other.

“No, I mean, how are things going with your classmates?”

“The usual. Ron and Hermione have a bit of a row, but it’ll be sorted out soon. Have you seen Longbottom recently, by the way?”

(Ron and Hermione were no longer on speaking terms, and Neville had been missing from school for a few weeks for reasons no one knew. _It’ll solve itself_ , Orochimaru thought, a familiar pain settling in his chest when he went through tense classes having to either choose to talk to Ron or Hermione. It wasn’t right, only speaking to one but not the other when they were right there. He was so very tired of feeling like a traitor.)

“No, I ha - Your housemates, Potter, not the Gryffindors,” the prefect sighed, “I know you like hanging with Weasley and Granger, I saw you by the lake with Weasley yesterday, but you’ve got to get to know the people you live with.”

Orochimaru shrugged. “I mind my business, and they mind theirs. Sometimes I talk to Cho Chang about her classes and sometimes I try to study with Terry Boot,” he said, knowing full well what this conversation was going to turn into. He’d seen the concerned looks from teachers when they saw him being ignored by his Housemates, even by the upperclassmen when he tried to hassle them for studying help outside of class and office hours. _No,_ _I’m_ _not_ _being bullied,_ he thought whenever he saw their frowns – he’d laugh at the idiot who would think they could bully the Snake Sannin. Most people would call what _he_ considered bullying to be a war crime.

“What’s this about me and Harry now?” a voice above Orochimaru’s head asked as a weight slowly descended on his head and back. Cho leaned over him, using Orochimaru’s head as a chin rest and looked down at his essay. “Bad table manners to eat and work at the same time, Harry. You’ll get food on your parchment.”

Orochimaru sniffed the air. “You smell like sweat. Disgusting.”

“The showers are up at least seven flights of stairs, and I’m hungry,” she whined, “Pass me a roll, won’t you?”

He tossed her the best looking dinner roll from the silver tray in front of him and remembered what today was. “How were Quidditch tryouts?”

“Great! I think I did really well!” Cho said, smiling, “But don’t try to redirect this conversation. Is the prefect giving you the ‘are you being bullied’ talk?”

“Yes, I am,” the prefect said, annoyed.

“Sometimes I see some Slytherins bothering him in the hallways, but Harry usually handles it pretty well,” Cho said, chewing on the roll, “I’ve had to step in once or twice though.”

“They can’t hurt me,” Orochimaru said blandly. The few times Cho had stepped in, he’d made sure to give his best “creepy supernatural child” impression, letting a little bit of killing intent leak out ever so slightly. The amount he used to scare genin, which meant it probably frightened Malfoy and crew halfway to early heart attacks, but he gave them credit for having the courage to come back the next day.

“You could probably beat Malfoy, but those other boys are twice your size. Harry, you’ve got to tell us if they’re hurting you,” Cho said.

“Everything is fine,” Orochimaru said with a small smile. It disappeared when a breadcrumb dropped onto his essay parchment. “Cho, are you getting crumbs in my hair?”

A pause, and then a gloved hand ruffled his hair. “...no?”

“I’d take points off for lying to an underclassman, Chang, but that was kind of adorable,” the prefect snickered. Orochimaru looked up at the boy in horror.

“I am not _adorable_ ,” he hissed, but the prefect and Cho looked at each other and laughed.

\---

Later that night, Orochimaru peered at his reflection into the dark water at the edge of the stone path in the Chamber of Secrets. He squished his cheeks, turning his face from side to side. _Nope, I don’t see it_. Koeda and Ogawa poked their heads out from the inside of his yukata.

“<Will we be going swimming?>” Ogawa asked. Orochimaru shook his head very quickly. For Sage’s sake they were technically underneath a _bathroom_ ; who knew what was in the water. A quick study of the Marauder’s Map seemed to imply that maybe it connected to Great Lake, and he hoped that it was the Lake that drained into the Chamber and not the other way around.

A few snakes popped their heads out of the water and slithered onto the cool stone around Orochimaru’s feet, and then dozens more followed, curling around his ankles but letting go as he gently stepped around them and up to the furthest part of the chamber, the clear area right in front of Slytherin’s statue. Water pooled around the scuplture’s beard in a shallow pool, reflecting the bright glowing crystals in the high cavern ceiling. He looked at the looming face with disgust and shook his head.

“<Regardless of the unflattering scenery>,” he said, waving a hand at the gigantic face, “<Will this work as a meeting place? How difficult was it to get here?>”

“<Not a challenge, Young Lord. The healthiest of us can swim all the way here while the water is still warm, and there are dry tunnels for the rest of us. Many more than we expected, in fact>,” an old hiss rattled out from the group of Forest snakes, and a chorus of assenting hisses followed. “<Her Highness is deep within that cavern. Are we to pay our respects?>”

Orochimaru sniffed in the air, the scent of basilisk almost suffocating and emanating from Slytherin’s stony mouth. “<No, we’ll let her sleep as long as - “

“<Let _who_ sleep?>” a deep voice echoed from the cavern. Orochimaru froze, his back turned to the cavern as he heard something heavy hit the water with a splash. The snakes at his feet scattered, slithering back and into the water or down the stone path. He closed his eyes and stood ramrod straight. Koeda and Ogawa wriggled around his stomach, tickling him in their fear.

“<I smell Sage!>,” a low, angry hiss rumbled as the great basilisk slowly slid out of her cavern and encircled Orochimaru. “< _You_ smell like Sage. Speak, human, before I swallow you whole for disturbing my slumber.>”

Orochimaru tilted his head up at where he thought the head of the basilisk was, but did not dare open his eyes. “<I was born Harry Potter, child of Lily Evans Potter and James Potter. In another life, I was Orochimaru of the snakes, child of Orochie of the snakes and Yamanaka Ryou, and in this form I go by my old name>,” Orochimaru said calmly, barely moving his mouth. He felt a light brush of air as the basilisk drew closer and nosed his hair. It fluttered with each of her breaths.

“<Long has it been since I have felt one like you, keeper of our magic unvarnished, but I do not understand. You smell like Sage, yet you are not of _her_.>”

Orochimaru’s brows furrowed. “<Pensie told me that I wasn’t the Sage yet though.>”

The basilisk was silent for a long time.

“<And yet here you are>,” she mused, curious, curling tighter around Orochimaru. “<You are a curious human, little Orochimaru. Tell me about yourself.>”

And so Orochimaru sat on the cool stone, not once opening his eyes, as he told the story of his first life, tragedy after tragedy in a world that begat wonder equally as often as it did cruelty and endless war, and the story of his second life, early in tragedy but otherwise relatively peaceful. The basilisk was markedly silent when he told her of his defeat of Lord Voldemort, when the snakes realigned themselves with their rightful leader.

“<There is much that is clear in my mind now>,” the basilisk said, once he had finished, “<My first master, when he sealed me away, his magic was in mayhem, and he was…despondent, and I did not understand why. And then when his heir reawakened me and I saw the stain of banishment in his blood, I did not know what to make of it. To hear that Master Slytherin would do something so vile as to try to assassinate the Sage…>”

The basilisk rested her head at Orochimaru’s feet, her eye level with the child’s head. She gazed upon the little human, the eerily pale skin and purple ringed eyes in sharp contrast to the length of smooth black hair. To her, it was much like he was a baby hatchling wearing human skin and teeth.

“<For the only human in my clan to have defeated my current master, though, and a hatchling like yourself no less, I cannot accept that. Lord Riddle is as powerful as his ancestors.>”

“<In truth, I feel that the credit should go to my mother>,” Orochimaru admitted. He’d read up on the speculation of how he’d survived, and the prevailing theory was to the effect of “the power of love made the Killing Curse backfire”, which was most likely a misinterpretation of whatever his mother had actually done.

“<Indeed. That scar on your head is proof enough>,” the basilisk grumbled.

“<Basilisk, I do not wish to be your master, even if yours is my enemy. I have waited for you to awaken for another reason entirely>,” Orochimaru said, bowing forward.

“<And if I were to consume you now as an enemy of my master? Even if you are to take on the title of Sage?>” the basilisk rumbled, but Orochimaru grinned.

“<Only if you could catch me, your Highness>,” he said. The basilisk growled and circled around him tighter, leaving not even a foot of space around Orochimaru. Her head hovered right above him.

“<Then I shall hear your request, and decide.>”

“<We are in need of a teacher>,” Orochimaru said, leaning back up to sitting, “<In the centuries you have been asleep, the snakes have lost the knowledge of their own magic. As the future Sage, it is my imperative to learn from the oldest master of the magic that we have.>”

“<What magic do you know? Those snakes that hide in your robes, have them reveal themselves and speak.>”

Koeda and Ogawa slowly slithered out of the front of Orochimaru’s yukata, bowing their heads down.

“<The enhancing of the senses, your Highness>,” Koeda said meekly.

“<Turning skin into scales. That is all we know>,” Ogawa whispered, embarrassed.

“<WHAT?>” the basilisk roared. Orochimaru winced and covered his ears, and the twin snakes escaped back into his clothing.

“<It is as they say>,” Orochimaru said, lowering his hands from his ears as the roar echoed away, “<We came here to continue learning what we could from each other.>”

The basilisk was silent once more. She loosened the circled around Orochimaru and lowered her head down to the ground again.

“<Orochimaru, look at me with open eyes>,” the basilisk said. He hesitated; looking at a basilisk in the eyes resulted in petrification at best, but if this was what he had to do –

He opened his eyes slowly, and saw the closed emerald green eyelid of the basilisk. The snake was truly massive, easily the length of the chamber and as thick as the entrance to her cave was. Embedded in her head was a single scarlet plume the length of her head.

“<When we are done with your training, you will be able to gaze into my eyes as all snakes can, and I will deem if you are worthy to be Sage, no matter what the magic decrees. You will come to the chamber every night at midnight for tutelage. We will start now.>”

“<Understood>,” Orochimaru hissed. He let out a silent sigh and stood up, his eyes gleaming in ecstatic glee.

\---

“What did I get myself into?” Orochimaru whispered to himself early next morning, eyes dry and forehead glued to the wooden dining table. His head hurt, his eyes hurt, his chest hurt (it turned out that the basilisk’s favorite method of teaching incentive for “her little naked hatching” was sitting on him, and she weighed _a lot_ ), everything hurt, but he couldn’t stop a smile from curling up his face. Terry scooted away from him a little bit.

“You alright, Harry?” the boy asked, leaning away from him.

“Marvelous, I think I could throw up,” he cackled.

“Want juice?” Terry said, holding out a glass of orange juice. Orochimaru snatched it and downed it in one gulp. The sugar spike was just what he needed to clear the minor headache that was going to become a migraine no matter what. “Thank you, Terry, I think I shall live to see another day.”

“Why did you pull another all-nighter, Harry? It’s Sunday,” Cho asked, taking a seat across from the two boys.

“Learning doesn’t stop on the weekend,” he grumbled, and Terry mimed throwing up in response.

“We’re Ravenclaw, but I’m a fan of taking a break every week,” Terry said, “I think I’ve maybe seen you asleep once or twice since the start of the term? Are you really getting sleep?”

Cho frowned at Orochimaru. “That’s not healthy, Harry, you won’t do well in classes if you don’t get your sleep. Do you need to see Madam Pomfrey?”

“I’m fine,” he sighed, taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes with the heel of his palms. Both Terry and Cho looked at each other with unconvinced glances.

“Going to study more today?” Terry asked him.

“I was going to get some fresh air, actually. I asked Madam Hooch if I could borrow a broom for practice this weekend,” he said.

“Ooh, you should fly with me, Harry! I want to see how good you really are! We can go to the pitch and play some one on one Quidditch games!” Cho exclaimed, grabbing Orochimaru’s hands into her own. Orochimaru nodded dutifully – always a good idea to have a spotter, in case he hurt himself. The three of them finished their breakfast in a light, jovial mood, and Cho and Orochimaru left Terry first to go on their flight.

Or, they would’ve, had they not bumped into a tearful Hermione on the stairs down to the courtyard after they’d picked up some brooms from Hooch’s office. Orochimaru caught her by the hand before she could fall down the stairs.

“Hermione?” Orochimaru asked, pulling her up to one of the steps. She wiped her eyes and looked at him, her eyes puffy and red. She tried to say something, but her lips quivered and she broke into a sob.

“Hey, hey, what’s going on? Did something happen?” Cho said, leaning down to wrap an arm around the girl. Hermione shook her head, her curly hair waving back and forth in their faces. Cho looked at Orochimaru, her brows scrunched together.

“Let’s go outside. Somewhere quiet,” he suggested, and Cho led the three of them past the courtyard and out to the path down to the lake. Orochimaru followed her up a hill where a single willow tree (not the Whomping kind) rose up alone, and the three of them sat under its branches, its green leaves just starting to yellow. He pulled out his wand and drew a small square in the air, Conjuring a small white handkerchief, and handed it to Hermione. She took it with shaking hands and wiped her face with it, but her face was still red and puffy.

“Granger, what happened?” Cho asked quietly, brushing the other girl’s hair away from her face. Hermione sniffled and cleared her throat.

“Ron is the worst,” she said, the sound of her voice off, like she was holding in a bubble in her throat.

“How so?” Orochimaru asked.

“He – I heard him, talking with the boys, he was making fun of how I pronounce my Charms,” Hermione sobbed, “He’s always doing that, behind my back, and I hate it! Everyone always does that to me, and it’s not fair! I’ve been studying so hard to catch up with everyone else, and I – “ she started, before going back into sobs.

“But Harry’s told me you’re the smartest first-year in the whole school,” Cho said.

“I wasn’t raised like everyone else!” she cried, “My parents aren’t magical! I didn’t know that magic was real until I came here!”

Cho closed her mouth, now twisted in a grimace. Orochimaru looked out to the lake, pensive.

“I just want somewhere where I belong,” Hermione whispered.

“But you do belong here,” Cho and Orochimaru said at the same time. They looked at each other, and Orochimaru motioned for her to speak. Hermione looked up between the two.

“You’re a witch, Granger, just like me, just like McGonagall, just like Rowena Ravenclaw, and just like every other witch ever! Doesn’t matter if you were raised by Muggles or wizards, if you can do magic, you belong here,” Cho said quietly.

“And even if you weren’t one, I don’t know anyone else who could go through the books in the library as fast as I can. Not even some of the upperclassmen,” Orochimaru said, “Nothing that anyone says can take away your knowledge and competence.”

“A Memory Charm can,” Hermione chuckled.

“Besides that,” Orochimaru brushed aside quickly, “You’re doing as well as anyone could acquainting yourself with an unfamiliar culture, and you should be proud of yourself for that. No matter what anyone else says. It’s a difficult thing to do.”

Hermione looked out to the lake, shook her head and burrowed her face into her knees.

“Granger, look at me,” Cho whispered, gently turning the girl’s head to face her. “I want you to repeat after me. ‘I am a witch.’”

“I’m a…a witch,” Hermione whispered.

“Louder,” Cho demanded.

“I’m a w-witch.”

“Louder.”

“I’m a witch,” Hermione said, looking right at Cho.

“Again,” Cho said, dragging Hermione up to her feet.

“I’m a witch!” Hermione shouted.

“Again!”

“I’M A WITCH!” Hermione yelled, and a gust of wind whirled around the tree, scattering leaves on the three children. Orochimaru batted the green and yellow onslaught out of his face. He watched his Conjured handkerchief, thrown to the wind, float off into the distance, and dispelled it with barely a wave and thought.

“Yes, Granger, you’re a witch, and that was your magic!” Cho said, pulling Hermione into a hug, “No one can say otherwise, okay? If anyone gives you trouble for that, take them to me and Harry, and we’ll give them a good talking to!”

“And more, if you wish,” Orochimaru said. Cho looked down at him.

“No violence, Harry, I don’t want to be expelled,” she said slowly.

“Boo,” he said, sticking out his tongue at her.

“You’re not alone, Granger, okay? You’re not alone anymore,” Cho said, turning back to Hermione in her arms. The other girl nodded, her hair tickling Cho’s nose.

“Call me Hermione.” Cho smiled into her hair.

“Okay, Hermione. Call me Cho.”

Orochimaru looked at the two girls, and then over the lake. It really was a beautiful day to go flying.

“Hermione, how do you feel about extracurricular flying practice?” he asked.

\---

“Hey Ron, what’s Potter doing down over there?” Dean Thomas asked his Housemate, peeking his head out of a window in the Gryffindor common room. Ron looked up from the chess game he was winning against his twin brothers and walked over to the window, Fred and George following behind him in curiosity. The four of them looked out the window at the sight of three figures flying around the castle on their brooms, one several feet above the other. Cho and Hermione hovered below Orochimaru, who was standing upright on his broom. He leaned back and –

The boys swore as he pivoted on the broom handle and stopped at a full half-rotation, standing perfectly upside down above the two witches, his robe hanging upside down off his arms. Hermione yelped, and she lifted up to Orochimaru’s altitude to talk his ears off. Cho stayed below and shook her head.

“Scary,” Dean muttered, shuffling back from the window. The Weasley siblings stayed, watching the two first-years fly around slowly, Cho following under them. Hermione’s hair whipped around in the gusts of wind, and she said something to the upside-down Orochimaru that made him laugh quietly. Ron scowled and pushed away from the window, storming up the dorm stairs.

“Where you going, Ronnykins? We’ve still got a game,” Fred asked.

“I don’t want to play anymore!” Ron yelled back. George looked back at the chessboard and then back out the window at the three children below.

“Can’t be Chang, she’s the fairest of them all,” Fred said.

“And Granger’s stuck up, but she hasn’t talked to widdle Ronny in what? A week?” George said.

“So that leaves Potter,” Fred whispered, watching the boy fly circles around Hermione, _still_ upside-down. The brothers were silent as Orochimaru’s robe fell off his arms, and the girls rushed to rescue it from a sudden gust of wind.

“Potter’s made our littlest brother quite sad, wouldn’t you say, Forge?” George said, glancing to his brother.

“Awfully rude of the Boy Who Lived, Gred,” his twin replied, looking out the window at the boy with overgrown brown hair and eyes so green he could see their clear hue from even meters away. Their fingers twitched, and they shared two halves of one mischievous, vindictive smile.

\---

The next morning, Orochimaru walked into the Great Hall for breakfast, stopped, sniffed the air, looked at his usual seat in the dead center of the right side of the Ravenclaw table with suspicion, and walked back out.

“Harry?” Cho asked as he passed her going in the opposite direction, but he ignored her and the small explosion that went off behind him. She whirled her head back to the Great Hall and saw a third-year Ravenclaw girl rip her robe off like it was on fire, and then she pinched her nose because the smell coming from the Hall was absolutely putrid, like an elephant had just -

“Dungbombs during breakfast? Didn’t Mum say she’d kill you if you set them off during a meal again?” Ron muttered to his scowling twins across the table through the din of the newly sowed chaos, watching them watch the teachers console the poor girl who had sat where Orochimaru normally did.

“Not if you don’t tell her,” Fred warned.

“Didn’t mean to get Malina though, we’ll have to make it up to her,” George groaned, “Did she say pink was her favorite color? Or was it purple?”

“I think she’d rather have your heads on pikes,” Ron deadpanned.

“Ooh, good idea.”

\---

Orochimaru brushed his hair back, lying under the willow tree that looked over the lake. Ever since Cho had shown him the spot two days before, he’d staked it out for himself after classes had ended. The sun shone in just the right way through the willow leaves, never hitting his eyes and yet blissfully warm but not too hot. Perfect napping weather, were it not for the waves of anxiety he felt radiating from the bottom of the hill and the smell of disinfectant that newly discharged hospital patients carried.

“Neville, you can come up, there’s no one else here,” he called out down the slope, which was partly a lie. Koeda slithered into his robes, wrapping himself under the robes and around Orochimaru’s right arm and hissing contentedly when the boy absently stroked his head. Neville scrambled up the hill, but he stopped a few feet from his classmate, gripping at his own robes in fistfuls. Orochimaru opened one eye and looked at the boy. “Is something the matter?”

Neville shook his head. He sat down, far away from Orochimaru, and curled his knees under his chin. He watched the lake in silence for a minute, the leaves quietly rustling in the wind.

“I’m sorry I went out of control during Flying and almost killed you,” Neville whispered.

“Historically speaking, It takes _a lot_ more than a fall to get rid of me,” Orochimaru said with a smirk, “I haven’t seen you in any of my classes since then. What happened?”

Neville curled up tighter in on himself. “Had to go to St. Mungo’s. I...Gran was upset, she wanted to pull me out of school and have me tutored, but…”

“You returned.”

“Yeah. The headmaster talked to Gran and convinced her to let me stay for the year. I’ve got a bunch to catch up on. Snape’s making me do all the potions I missed on my own next weekend, and I don’t get it at all. He wouldn’t tell me what I needed to read in the Potions book and what potions he’s expecting,” Neville frowned.

“Typical Snape,” Orochimaru sneered, “Has no one in your House told you what we’ve gone over?”

Neville shook his head. “Everyone talks about me behind my back. They all hate me.”

“I would say it’s less about hate and more about mockery, but regardless, it’s unproductive. Would you like to copy my notes?”

“You’d let me do that?” Neville stared at Orochimaru like he had just said he’d won a million Galleons.

Orochimaru shrugged. “Snape is a bad teacher, our classmates are petty, and I strive to do as much as I can to be better than both.”

“I thought you liked Weasley and Granger.”

“Besides them, Cho, and Terry. And the prefect, I suppose, if he’d stop waking me up so early,” he grumbled. Orochimaru sat up, wiping the grass and dirt from the back of his robes. “Can you cast an Accio, or will we have to go get parchment and ink ourselves?”

“Can’t cast one,” Neville said sheepishly, scrambling up, “You know, Harry, you’re not as scary as everyone says you are.”

Orochimaru smirked. “You’re absolutely right. I’m nowhere nearly as frightening as I could be.”

Neville shivered, even though the sun was only just beginning to set. He stumbled down the hill, racing to his tower. Orochimaru watched him almost trip over himself, but each time the grass did _something_ and he looked up at the swaying branches of the tree, the yellowing leaves on the dark branches and trunk. He rested a hand on the wood, subtly reaching out to the magic in the roots with his pseudochakra. It brushed him back quickly, but not before he felt it curl protectively around Neville.

He snorted – of course there was a magical equivalent of a Mokuton user. _He’s an interesting boy_ , Orochimaru thought. He took his hand off the tree’s trunk and walked down the hill, following the Gryffindor back to the castle. Neville waited for him at the bottom of the hill.

“Ah, could you also help me with Charms, Harry? I’m behind a few essays,” Neville asked. Orochimaru rolled his eyes.

“Sure, why not. It never hurts to review the basics,” he said. Neville smiled at him and took a step forward, not looking where he was going and pressing his foot down on a soft, small button hidden in the grass. Orochimaru saw the flash of light at Neville’s feet first and yanked the boy by the collar just as three poles popped quickly out of the ground. Neville screamed into his ear.

“They’re fake, Neville,” Orochimaru sighed, dropping the boy’s collar as far from his head as possible and walke up to the repurposed broomsticks topped with cackling mannequin heads. The bewitched heads of 18th century French nobles jeered at him, mouths opening and closing rapidly like a puppets, but unable to say anything intelligible. He poked the cheek of one of the heads with a huge white pompadour; it came back powdery and red with cheap blush. Orochimaru growled and flicked it off his hands.

“W-w-w-what are those doing here?” Neville cried, scrambling back from the pikes.

“An excellent question,” Orochimaru mumbled, sniffing the air as the magic slowly shifted into his nostrils. The heads reeked of cheap makeup, but behind that was a scent of pumpkin, human, rustic but tinted with the bite of metal and chemicals – a mix of odors that was overwhelmingly familiar to him. He clicked his tongue and furrowed his brows in annoyance – this was out of character for Ron, so it was probably those brothers of his. Shaking his head, he pulled the stakes out of the ground and bundled them under his arm. He looked back at Neville and held out a hand, helping the boy up to his feet. Neville stayed far away from the chattering heads.

“Where are you taking those?” Neville asked.

“To your common room.”

“Um...why?” the boy asked. Orochimaru gave him a smile that promised pain.

“I think someone in your House knows who these belong to.”

Neville followed him in silence, staying on the opposite side of the pikes. They quickly got to the common room, Neville giving the suspicious and disconcerted portait the correct password on the third try. It was crowded inside, but all conversation stopped as Orochimaru walked in with the disembodied heads and the most disapproving look he could muster. Neville quickly ran up to the dorm, eager to not be the center of attention, while Orochimaru made a beeline to Ron, who was hunched over a desk, scrawling out a Potions essay. He threw the pikes onto the table, frightening Ron into a terrified scream.

“Yes, Neville said the same thing. I personally find them historically inaccurate. Madame de Pompadour died of tuberculosis, not the guillotine,” he said with no humor, casting a Silencing Charm on all three heads. “Do you know who did this?”

Ron shook his head. “N-no! Why’d you think I’d know?”

Orochimaru hummed and rolled the poles towards Ron, knocking over his inkpot. “Just a hunch,” he said with a dead smile. “Please do tell the perpetrators that it didn’t work and that I am unamused.”

Neville rushed down the stairs, shoving some quills into his bag, and Orochimaru waved for him to follow. “Well, if you’ll excuse us, Gryffindors.” The pair stepped out of the room, and as soon as the portrait closed behind them, Fred and George shot down the stairs and grabbed their prank poles.

“He wasn’t scared one bit! Scary Potter indeed!” Fred laughed, waving his wand to remove the bewitchment. The heads jolted to a stop and the painted faces melted away – three pumpkins stuck onto pikes remained.

“Got Longbottom pretty good though, I think this one’s a keeper,” George beamed, “What should call this one? ‘Historical Headless Hysterics’?”

“Should’ve known it was you,” Ron groaned, “What’d Harry do to you?”

The twins looked at each other, then at their brother, confused. “He’s not a good friend to you, Ronnykins. You don’t walk away from a game like you did unless you’re upset.”

Ron scowled. “He can hang out with whoever he wants. It’s none of my business.”

“Like we said, not a good friend.”

“He won’t be my friend at all if you keep on bothering him!” Ron yelled, sweeping his hand across the desk. He knocked the inkpot clean across the room and into the fire, a black line staining the red and gold carpet. He snatched his parchment off the table and ran back up to his room, tears in his eyes. The rest of the room stared back at the twins.

“You two got a death wish?” Angelina Johnson asked, not bothering to look up from the library copy of Quidditch Through The Ages.

“Yes!”

“It’s our favorite kind!”

\---

 _W_ _hat is it about this spot and emotional_ _events_ _?_ Orochimaru wondered as he laid under the same willow tree, at the same time as he had the day before, feeling the same roiling anxiety coming from the same spot at the bottom of the hill.

“You don’t need an appointment, Ron, I’m not your boss,” he called out down the hill, not bother to open his eyes. And like last time, a Gryffindor walked up the hill, unsure of himself, yet still more confident by Longbottom by far, and sat down next to him. Ron groaned and flopped down, yelping when his head hit a root. Orochimaru felt the tree huff in annoyance, barely audible in the magic.

“I’m sorry about my brothers, Harry, I don’t know what’s gotten into them. They think you’re being mean to me,” Ron sighed, “You haven’t been though, not at all. Not like Malfoy or Hermione.”

“Now that’s an unfair comparison, Hermione is a bright girl and intellectually stimulating company.”

“She’s such a know-it-all!” Ron yelled, “’Ron, help me carry half the library back to the dorm!’, ‘Ron, it’s Levee-oh-sa, not Leveeoh-sa’, ‘Ron, don’t you know any better?’, I’m not stupid!”

“And making fun of a lonely girl who’s scared of the new world she’s been thrust into is how you solve the problem?”

Ron grimaced. “No, but…” He threw up his hands. “She’s so frustrating! She just goes and says stuff without thinking! No wonder nobody likes her!”

“I like her, and so does Cho Chang,” Orochimaru said, opening one eye to look at his fuming friend, “Ron, what is the real problem here?”

“Why do you care?” Ron spat.

“Your feud is making class very awkward. I want two of my best friends in this school to get along,” he said softly, looking up at the leaves, “Otherwise I have to pick between one or the other, and then I feel more alone.”

Ron opened his mouth to say something, but he looked at the blank look on Orochimaru’s face, and dropped his train of thought. The boy turned back to face the lake.

“Sorry. Didn’t realize that was how either of you felt,” he whispered, “I feel like that too, when we’re in class, when you and Gra – Hermione do everything perfect in class.”

“Why?”

“You two are just so smart, and you’re all so good at magic, and I can’t keep up with either of you. I’m a Weasley, I should be able to, but I’m nothing like my brothers. I’m not geniuses like them.”

“What _do_ you want to be?”

Ron shrugged. “Popular, captain of the Quidditch team, top of the class, I don’t know.”

Orochimaru chuckled. “I think it’s that last one. Despite what the Sorting implies, you don’t have to have everything figured out at 11. We have seven years at this school. Even if you think you want to be all those things, I’ve found that gossips tend to be the most unproductive at reaching their goals.”

Ron groaned. “She really is a know-it-all, though.”

“Yes, of course she is, she reads books like you eat food,” Orochimaru said with a fond smile, “But she’s also the one who watched our chess match and tried the weird flavors of Every Flavor Beans when we bought a few packs from the trolley and you dared us to try them. She’s a kid just like you and me who wants to be friends, and we’re just trying to figure ourselves out. What’s the point of hurting each other unnecessarily?”

“Fine, I get it, I’m sorry I was a git to Hermione,” Ron said, throwing his hands in the air, “Can’t say that to her at this point though. We can’t even be in the same room anymore except for class.”

Orochimaru sighed. _Of course it got this far. Dammit._

\---

Hermione didn’t register the clacking on the window class the first, second, third, or fourth time. On the fifth, she looked up and wondered if a bird was getting caught up in its reflection, but there was nothing but a small pebble hovering in the air. Confused, she got up and looked out the window, down at the courtyard below. There were two figures, one redheaded and one holding a wand in the air. He signaled her with a beckoning gesture.

“He couldn’t be bothered to take the stairs?” she huffed, walking back to her spot and packing up the books. She quickly left the library, going down the stairs and out to the courtyard, scowling when she saw Orochimaru holding a miffed Ron by a bicep.

“Peace, Hermione,” Orochimaru said calmly before she could say something, raising his hand between them. “Ron, I believe you have something to say to her.”

Ron stepped forward meekly, ears red in embarrassment. Orochimaru glanced at him; the poor boy looked anxious. He gently shoved him a step forward.

“I’m sorry I said nasty things about you behind your back,” Ron said quietly, unable to meet the girl in the eyes. “I was mad that you kept on dragging me around to carry your books and I was jealous that you were doing so much better than me at everything, and I should’ve told you that instead of talking behind your back.”

Hermione’s face deflated, and Ron panicked when he saw the tears at the corner of her eyes.

“But I want to be your friend!” he added, panicked, “You and Harry are the first people I met here and you guys are super smart and I didn’t realize that you were scared and I’m sorry!” Orochimaru crossed his arms and looked at the back of Ron’s red head in surprise; he hadn’t said that on the hill.

Hermione blinked back the tears in her eyes, sniffling.

“Oh, Ron, I didn’t realize...I’m sorry for dragging you around when you didn’t want to,” she cried, “I know I can be stubborn, but I’m sorry that I was selfish. I want to be your friend too, if that’s alright?”

Ron beamed at her with wet eyes. “Yeah, ‘mione, you, me, and Harry, we’ll all be friends again!” Hermione nodded enthusiastically. Orochimaru sighed in relief and smiled a little. That uneasy feeling, of not being a set of three perfectly matching parts, dissipated, the slight twinge of tightness in his chest releasing itself. His shoulders sagged a little _,_ only just now aware of the tension he had been carrying, and his smile grew wider, happier, at being part of a unit of three again when a blob of pink paint dropped from the floor above and hit him on the head.

Hermione and Ron yelped and jumped back from the splash zone, drops of paint sticking to their shoes. Orochimaru did not, could not bring himself to move a muscle. He looked down at his robes, now a bright, neon, sickly pink and smelled faintly of cough medicine.

“Did we get him, Master Gred?” Fred yelled from across the courtyard.

“Bullseye, Master Forge! Sorry about the shoes, Ron, Hermione, but that doesn’t come out!” George laughed.

“It doesn’t come out,” Orochimaru said with a serene smile on his face. Ron shimmied off one of his loafers, and grimaced as he recognized the paint.

“I heard them talking about this over the summer. They were calling them Permanently Pink Paintbombs – oh, so that’s why we have a pink tablecloth! I thought Mum just bought a new one.”

“’Permanently Pink’,” Orochimaru repeated, eyes unfocused.

“Oh dear, Harry, I’m so sorry they did this. If I was a Prefect, I’d take so many points from Gryffindor,” Hermione console, edging closer to Orochimaru, but he put up a hand to back her away. He turned to look at the snickering figures of Fred and George Weasley, and then down at his clothing. _It doesn’t come_ out, he thought as he ran a finger along his scalp, catching a good amount of the goop under his fingernail. Out of the corner of his eyes, he saw Imomeigetsu slither out of hiding from a bush and head towards the twin Weasleys, hissing all sorts of vile language at them, and then he had an idea.

He pulled out his wand.

“Harry…” Ron warned, seeing the worrying expression on Orochimaru’s face, but the other boy ignored him. He pointed his wand at Imomeigetsu, silently flicked a charm at the snake, and let the killing intent that he’d been holding back _flow_.

No one could move under the sudden pressure, the immense fear they suddenly felt, and they could only watch as Imomeigetsu began to grow in size rapidly, larger and larger until she was the size of the basilisk. Orochimaru leaped onto her head with a single jump, eyes cold with murderous intent focused on the cowering Weasley twins.

“<Young Lord?>” she asked.

“ _Eat_ ,” he commanded, and she looked down on the boys and opened her jaws wide. The twins jolted out of shock and scrambled away just as she snapped her mouth down where they were only a second ago. They ran into the castle screaming for their lives, but Orochimaru cackled and with a wave of his hand, Imomeigetsu gave chase, slithering her humongous body down the corridor.

“RunrunrunrunrunRUN!” George screamed at the top of his lungs, speeding through corridors and up staircases as fast as his legs could carry him. He and his brother shoved past confused students and teachers, who dove to the walls and into classrooms as they saw the giant snake whip through the hallway, Orochimaru perched on top her head with a face that promised a painful death.

“We’re sorry, spare us, Potter!” Fred yelled behind him. Orochimaru’s lips twisted into a snarl, and his killing intent only grew more potent, a heavy, dark chill permeating through the halls that smothered any warmth. He shook his head, and flecks of Permanently Pink splattered on his glasses. He would make the boys pay for this with _their_ _flesh and_ _blood_.

The twins turned a corner on the third floor, and skidded to a stop as they found themselves face to face with a door at a dead end. Fred furiously tried to open the door, but it was locked shut, and he froze as he heard the low hiss of a giant snake. He turned slowly as he found himself in the shadow of the gigantic Imomeigetsu, made darker with the weight of Orochimaru’s malice. They looked up at the python’s gigantic yellow eyes, and drew their wands at the same time.

“Accio Broom!” they yelled together, and Orochimaru turned as he heard the sound of breaking glass and surprised screams. Two broomsticks zoomed past his head and into the hands of the now grinning twins, who jumped on their brooms and zipped past him. But Imomeigetsu smoothly turned around and gave chase again at her flying targets. They zipped above the students and around wall-mounted candelabras and out to the main staircase on the floor, hovering several feet above the third floor in the center of the open room where the snake could not reach.

“<Little pigeons, come down to me>,” Imomeigetsu crooned, although Orochimaru could feel her vibrate with annoyance. He drew his wand and threw two Stupefies right at the twins, but they dodged them with quick jerks to the side. He growled and ripped a strip from his ruined robe.

“Nerefors,” Orochimaru hissed, and the strip became a bundle of senbon, this time _definitely_ tipped with poison. He took a few between his fingers and launched them in a spray of deadly fire.

“Woah!” George yelped, ducking right before they hit him, and looking back with the blood draining from his face as he saw the senbon drive deep into the stone pillar. “Potter, you’re going to kill us!”

“Excellent!” the boy snarled with a manic smile and threw another set at the twin brother. Fred ducked and flew down to avoid the needles, but Imomeigetsu curled up into a spiral and launched herself at the boy, knocking him down with her head onto staircase landing. The bottom of her head hit the railing, leaving half of her body hanging in the air.

Fred looked up at Orochimaru in fear. The boy was mostly that gaudy pink, his glasses half covered in paint, but he could see the green eyes glow cold and vicious. It was crushing to behold, and Fred scrambled back as fast as he could but his back hit the opposite railing. Imomeigetsu reared her head back to strike, opening her jaws wide and revealing her blade-sharp teeth -

“That’s quite enough.”

Four heads whipped around to look down at the bottom of the stairs, where one Albus Dumbledore watched them placidly, hands behind his back. He quickly glanced at Orochimaru, the boy atop the snake, needles in both hands, and covered in pink paint.

“It doesn’t come out,” Orochimaru said, gesturing to his dyed hair and clothes.

“I see,” Dumbledore said with a nod, “And the snake?”

Imomeigetsu grumbled and narrowed her eyes at the old wizard. She slid forward, down the steps slowly, until her whole body was on the staircase. Her head stopped only a few feet from Dumbledore.

“In the right place at the right time,” Orochimaru said with a shrug as he dropped down to the ground. He patted the python’s head and she leaned into the touch, humming low and happy. “Isn’t she beautiful?”

“<Bah, flattery will get you nowhere>,” Imomeigetsu chirped, but Orochimaru ignored her. He watched Dumbledore’s eyes flick between the two, the man watching for something. _So he suspects my connection with the snakes. Does he think I’m aligned to Dark magic?_

“Would you mind shrinking the snake back, Mr. Potter? I’m sure she would like to go back home,” Dumbledore chuckled. Orochimaru pouted, but the headmaster did not budge. The boy sighed and turned back to his snake. He tapped his wand on her snouth, whispering a Shrinking Charm. The python wriggled around as she shrank back to her normal size in the matter of a few seconds, and she slithered away down the corridor.

“50 points from Ravenclaw, Mr. Potter, for damaging school grounds, starting a fight, performing magic on an animal in an unsupervised setting, and general mayhem. Two weeks of detention with Professor Flitwick.”

“Okay,” Orochimaru said with a shrug. House points weren’t worth anything to him anyways and he didn’t mind Flitwick.

“50 points from Gryffindor, Misters Weasley and Weasley, for damaging another student’s property, flying on brooms indoors, and general mayhem,” Dumbledore called out up the stairs to a prone Fred Weasley being helped up by his brother, “and detention for two weeks with Professor McGonagall.”

The Weasley brothers groaned, and Fred slumped back down to the stone, his head hitting the floor with a clunk. George hopped off his broom and onto the stairs. “Dammit,” they grumbled.

Dumbledore walked up the stairs leisurely, motioning for Orochimaru to follow him. The boy was a step behind him, at his side, as they climbed the stairs. Orochimaru glanced at the unusual wand in the headmaster’s hands, clutched behind his back, a thin stick of wood with little bulbs every few inches. As if he felt the boy’s eyes on the wand, Dumbledore pocketed it and glanced down at his student. Orochimaru was peeling off the ruined robe from his shoulders, holding it with his fingertips and as far away from himself as he could. They reached the landing, and the headmaster looked up at the stone columns along the fourth floor corridor and at the senbon that were embedded in the rock.

“Potter, are you able to get those needles out of the walls?” Dumbledore asked. Orochimaru nodded and waved his wand at the senbon. They instantly Transfigured back into pink and black threads and quickly fell down to the ground floor.

“Does your paint really not come out? Is Mr. Potter’s hair to be dyed pink forever?” the headmaster asked the twins. Fred and George shook their heads with no lack of enthusiasm.

“Permanently Pink Paintbombs – patent pending - stain fabrics forever! Wipes off rock, metal, and glass with a little bit of vinegar and a rag, but getting it off skin and hair’s kind of a drag!” they said in tandem, like they had rehearsed their jingle. Orochimaru’s eye twitched, but Dumbledore put a hand on his shoulder as he emanated a little bit of killing intent again.

“Cheap Muggle shampoo works best,” Fred coughed, smiling to hide his fear. Dumbledore pinched the bridge of his nose as the oppressive intent doubled.

“You would have me put _sulfates_ on my head?” Orochimaru hissed, ignoring the hand on his shoulder gripping tighter in warning.

“Hey now, you’re the one who’s been nasty to little Ronnykins!” George said, standing in front of his brother and using his broom as a shield. Orochimaru frowned in confusion.

“I do not control whatever jealousy he harbored before I had him reconcile with Hermione. Which happened right before you did,” Orochimaru said, gesturing to himself, “this.”

“So you’re not making fun of him?” Fred asked, peeking behind his brother.

“No.”

“Not making him cry on purpose?” George asked.

“No.”

“Not being a bad friend?” they asked together.

“I asked him to stop talking about our other friend behind her back.”

Fred and George looked at each other, then back at Orochimaru. The boy made a good impression of a wet cat, bristling with disgust at the pink on his body.

“Harry!” two voices yelled from the floor below. Orochimaru leaned over the railing and looked down at Ron and Hermione. Ron carried a fresh uniform in his arms, albeit in the Gryffindor colors, and Hermione had a laundry basket on her hip.

“We got you a spare!” Ron yelled, waving the bundle of clothes in his arms. One of the shirts slipped out from the pile and over the railing, but Hermione quickly drew her wand with her free hand and caught it with a Levitation Charm.

“Honestly, Ron,” she sighed as she floated the button down shirt back to his pile, but she had a small smile on her face, one that Ron matched.

“Thanks, ‘mione!” he said, and Orochimaru smiled a little when the girl blushed. He turned back to the twins, who were now standing shoulder to shoulder, wringing their hands together.

“We’re quite sorry, Potter - “

“Completely misread the situation - “

“Older sibling instincts kicked in, can’t help it - “

“By the way, would you mind teaching us - “

“How you did all that?” they asked in sync. Orochimaru looked back and forth between the two.

“You’ll have to be more specific,” he said, folding his arms and arching an eyebrow.

“The standing upside down thing - “

“And the snake - “

“Not to mention those needles - “

“Aim of a Chaser, glad you can’t get on the Ravenclaw Quidditch team yet - “

“Don’t get pulled in by any propaganda that Chang girl gives you, you hear - “

“What training have you got?”

Orochimaru studied the two boys, the curiosity in their eyes familiar and welcome to him. _They don’t have the conditioning of even Academy students, but they were able to catch me off guard. Maybe I really am getting soft…_

_But what can I get out of this?_

“You two are in the business of business, from what I’ve heard?” Orochimaru said, and the twins nodded. “I’ll try to teach you how I did that, but you must tell me how you made your detestable paint bombs.”

The boys’ faces lit up in glee, and in a flash they were on either side of Orochimaru, arms linked, ignoring the pink getting onto their own robes.

“You’re speaking our language, Harry -”

“Can we call you Harry, by the way - “

“We’ll get that paint off you in a jiffy - “

“Turn your hair back to boring old brown - “

“Actually, would you be interested in the trademark Weasley red - “

The trio of them walked down the stairs, arm in arm, the twins jovial and Orochimaru slightly dumbstruck. Dumbledore watched them leave in silence, a simmering feeling of unease in his heart. The boy was showing a surprising amount of familiarity with a snake already, but more importantly...

Dumbledore had the distinct feeling that he needed to preemptively apologize to Professor Flitwick.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll be participating in [Naruto AU Week](https://naruto-au-week.tumblr.com/) next month! The next chapter of this work will be up a few days after that event ends.
> 
> As always, thank you to everyone who's kudos'd, bookmarked, commented, and/or subscribed to this work!


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Orochimaru goes on a fetch quest!

Flitwick glanced up from the stack of essays he was grading. “Mr. Potter, how is the cleaning coming along?”

From the other end of the sunlit office, Orochimaru poked his head out from behind stacks of yellowed parchment twice his height. His mouth was covered with a dusty purple handkerchief tied around his face. “Fine, Professor, but I think you might want to see these.” He held out a small red hardcover book that was woefully familiar to Flitwick. “These have the other professors’ names in them.”

“I’ve been looking for those,” Flitwick said, grimacing. “Could you bring them over here?”

The boy jumped down from the bench, cradling a small stack of books and scrolls in his hands. They were no longer so frightfully bony, Flitwick thought. Barely two months of Hogwarts meals, and already the boy’s face was filling out with the fat that should’ve been there in the first place. The green eyes flickered to the books all around him, taking in their titles with interest. Flitwick smiled to himself – despite the boy’s behavior that landed him in detention in the first place, he was always going to be partial to students who craved knowledge.

Orochimaru gently set the stack on the professor’s table and stepped back, drawing the handkerchief down from his face and patting the dust off his robes. Flitwick flipped through the books and unrolled the scrolls, sorting them into two piles on his desk. He sighed and pushed a very small pile of books forward towards Orochimaru.

“Could you do me a favor and return these to the teachers they belong to? If you come back promptly, I’ll let you leave detention early today.” Orochimaru nodded and picked up the books, trotting out the door without a word. Flitwick looked at the massive pile of archived student essays his student had left behind and mentally berated himself for not cleaning up sooner. Maybe if he didn’t look at them, they’d go away on their own.

\---

Orochimaru stopped a few feet from Flitwick’s office and looked down at the first book in the pile. It was a Muggle book about...fire safety? The cover had a picture of the top half of a fire extinguisher, and when he flipped open the book, the name “Quirrell” was written in scratchy print on the title page. _Right, he was the Muggle Studies professor_ , he reminded himself.

He jogged down the empty seventh floor corridor and down the five flights of stairs to Quirrell’s office, pausing just a moment to glance down the banned third floor corridor. It smelled faintly of dog, and was due for another exploration soon, if the basilisk would give him the time (she wouldn’t). The second floor was just as quiet as the seventh – what did students need to be in class on a weekend? He wandered around until he found the dark corridor where Quirrell’s office was, bright light peeking from the door’s outline, though he could’ve found it from the smell of garlic wafting in the hallway. Orochimaru raised his hand to knock on the door, but stopped as he heard faint plucking tones on the other side. It wasn’t a real melody, just the sound of idle improvisation. He knocked on the door, and the music stopped.

“Come in,” Quirrell’s muffled voice called, and Orochimaru pushed the door open. He stopped and blinked at the sudden brightness; Quirrell’s office had neither windows nor flame-lit lamps, and Orochimaru’s eyes widened as he looked up and saw light bulbs hovering upside down in the air. Electricity was notoriously reactive to magic – it either exploded in your face or didn’t work at all. In a magic castle, it was easy to forget it even existed.

“Mr. Potter, this is a surprise. Has Filius sent you on an errand?” Quirrell asked, his voice unusually calm and steady, like he was a completely different person. Orochimaru nodded and glanced at the instrument in Quirrell’s lap, a small, miniature harp-like thing, golden and shaped like half of an oval, curling up and out. Quirrell followed his gaze and chuckled.

“Never seen one of these before in person? They’re quite uncommon these days,” he said, holding up the lyre. “I find music to be a grounding exercise. It helps calm the nerves.” His hands idly strummed the strings, delicate whispers of notes drifting into the air.

“Who was your teacher?” Orochimaru asked.

“My mother. She was a Muggle actress - the stage, of course, not the telly or movies. The Greeks were her favorites, and she was trained to sing, dance, play music, all of it,” he said fondly, looking up at something behind Orochimaru. The boy turned and looked at the picture on the wall, a color photo of Quirrell and his family. His hair was choppy and red like the Weasleys’, but his face was a little rounder, a little softer. Beside him, a middle-aged man with receding, graying hair and a beautiful woman in a flowery dress laughed at the camera. The picture did not move – it had been taken with a Muggle camera.

“How did you get those to work?” he asked, pointing at the bulbs above his head.

“I took classes at the local uni during summer breaks. I know my protons from my electrons,” he chucking, picking up his wand from his desk and pointing it at a bulb. It dimmed and hovered down to his head. “Each individual enchantment takes no shortage of finesse and a good electromagnet to start it up. I’m sure you know that magic has never worked well with electric fields, but it can be reasoned with if you’ve got an astronomical amount of time and wit to spare. I’ve been trying to get telly to work too, but there’s too much interference within the castle to get a good signal.”

Orochimaru looked at the bulb in wonder, trying to feel out the magic circling around the glass and metal. It was fragile, the balance delicate, but ever so slightly he could sense the pulsing current in the filament of the bulb. Quirrell smiled at his student.

“Not all wizards are set in the traditional ways. There are some who are in favor of marrying Muggle science with magic, who don’t think it’s a lost cause, and I am in correspondence with a few of those witches and wizards.”

“Why are you studying this?” Orochimaru asked.

“Muggle science has always interested me,” Quirrell chuckled a little darkly, “So many people think that Muggle Studies is a waste of a career, but I think we as a community could benefit a lot from more diversity in our ways of thinking about the world. I wish I could’ve gone more in depth with Muggle science when I taught Muggle Studies, but Albus always shot down my proposed curriculum changes. Maybe I should’ve proposed it a new elective instead…” he trailed off.

“I’ve gotten off track, my apologies. What did Filius need, Mr. Potter?”

“Returning a book from him, sir,” Orochimaru said, placing the book on Quirrell’s desk. “What did he need to know about Muggle fire safety for?”

Quirrell shrugged, equally as confused. “I suppose he was just curious, as all us Ravenclaws are. Anything else, Mr. Potter?”

Orochimaru looked around, at the books both magical and mundane that lined the office walls. “Would you really be willing to teach a science elective? I think I’d like to take that class. There aren’t very many books on Muggle sciences in the library.”

Quirrell blinked at him, shocked, and Orochimaru wondered why the teacher was forcing a kind smile.

“You really are a Ravenclaw, aren’t you?” Quirrell said, “Here, let me get you something.” He set the lyre down on his desk and stood up, reaching to the top shelves to pick out a small tome, a plain white hardback cover with a black spine. He handed it to Orochimaru.

“This written by a friend of mine from uni. Smartest witch I’ve ever met, she’s the one that inspired me to do these,” he said, pointing up at the light bulbs. “You can keep this one, I’ve got a signed copy at home.”

Orochimaru’s eyes lit up as he took it and put it at the bottom of his pile. “Professor, thank you.”

“Of course. Stop by my office hours whenever you like,” the professor said, and he waved at the boy who scampered out of his room.

\---

Orochimaru walked out of the dark hallway and back into the light, stopping at a window facing the west and the setting sun. He pulled out the book Quirrell had given him and flipped through it – and in the preface discovered that the author suggested being proficient in Muggle university-level physics before diving into the book. He figured he was maybe high school level at this point.

“<Young Lord?>” a voice hissed above him and Orochimaru had only that as warning before Imomeigetsu dropped down from some hole in the ceiling onto his shoulders, and wrapped herself on top his pile of books.

“<Good afternoon, where are the twins? The snake ones, not the Weasleys.>”

“<Shame, I enjoyed chasing them around>,” Imomeigetsu huffed, “<Koeda and Ogawa are hunting - many mice have come into the castle from the cold.>”

“<And you?>”

“<I’m getting a free ride around the castle>,” she said smugly. Orochimaru rolled his eyes and put the book back into the pile. He went down another flight of stairs and stopped in front of McGonagall’s office just to the right of the staircase. He knocked, although he knew she was already there, and pushed the door open.

“Mr. Potter, to what do I owe the pleasure?” she asked kindly, although her gaze flicked between him and Imomeigetsu as Orochimaru walked up to her desk.

“I have a delivery for you. <Imomeigetsu, if you would, please.>”

The python slithered up his arm and around his neck, turning her head to stare right back at the teacher. Orochimaru dropped a worn, untitled leatherbound book on McGonagall’s desk.

“You’re a Parselmouth?” McGonagall asked. Orochimaru almost laughed out loud at her feint.

“Don’t play dumb, you already knew that,” he said with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “Why were you spying on me?”

McGonagall hesitated, lips drawn tight in frustration, but she relented after a moment of internal debate. “To make sure you were safe. The war ended, but his cause did not. If something were to happen to you - ”

Orochimaru snorted. “Did you ever tell whoever you report to what kind of people the Dursleys are?” Imomeigetsu curled tighter around his neck. McGonagall shook her head.

“Believe me, if there was any other better choice, I would’ve advocated for it posthaste. But we – and the law – decided to leave you with them.”

“And who is ‘we’?” Orochimaru asked playfully. McGonagall shifted uncomfortably in her seat, but she held her mouth shut. After a few moments, Orochimaru sighed and waved it off.

“No matter, I’ll figure it out later.” _It’ll be a fun exercise_ , he thought.

“Oh, Merlin, you probably will,” McGonagall grumbled. If he was anything like he was in class, she’d wager good money that he’d figure it out within the year. “By the way, Mr. Potter, I have something for you.”

“Oh?” Orochimaru cocked his head, Imomeigetsu matching him. He didn’t remember asking the professor for anything…

McGonagall pulled out a thin packet of parchment, bound with string. “FOR POTTER’S EYES ONLY, AS WRITTEN BY MSSRS GRED AND FORGE LEASWEY” was scrawled in huge letters across the cover.

“Those boys left this behind after they left my detention today,” McGonagall explained, handing the packet over, “Now, can I trust that you will not use these spells and recipes to cause mayhem?”

“Yes, you can, Professor,” Orochimaru lied cheerfully, taking the papers. He flipped through the pages – recipes for prank potions and charm demonstrations were crammed on each page, with nearly illegible notes scrawled in the margins. Reading the notes of madmen throwing everything at the wall, it was like coming home to him.

“Carry on, Mr. Potter. I’ve got nothing more for you here,” McGonagall said, leaning back in her chair. Orochimaru nodded and made to leave the room, but he stopped just before he opened the door.

“One last thing, Professor,” he said quietly, looking back at his teacher. “Thank you for what honesty you can give. I appreciate it.” He left the office before McGonagall could respond.

\---

“<She reports to the headmaster>,” Imomeigetsu whispered into his ear once they were further from the office, “<Even he has shown remorse for having to keep you there, but our kind concern him. He knows you are our Young Lord, but perhaps he does not understand what it means.>”

“<I suspected as much>,” Orochimaru sighed, scritching the bottom of Imomeigetsu’s head. “<Keep an eye on them.>”

“<Of course, Young Lord. Where to next?>”

Orochimaru looked down at the last book in the pile, a thin untitled black book barely touched, with the name ‘Severus Snape’ scrawled on the back of an invoice peeking out of the pages. “<The dungeons.>”

He took the stairs down, finally running into other students, the few of them he encountered all Slytherins who exclusively roamed Hogwarts’ deepest, darkest corners outside of classes. They gave him wide-eyed stares, or rather gave the python curled around his neck those stares, and Imomeigetsu preened under the attention. They were one corridor down from Snape’s classroom when Malfoy’s whiny voice echoed from behind them at the other end of the hall.

“Did you get lost on your way to your ivory tower, Scary? Or did they finally kick you out for losing all their House points?” Malfoy crowed. He walked up to Orochimaru, Crabbe and Goyle flanking him as always.

“Hello, Slytherin,“ Orochimaru drawled.

“It’s Draco Malfoy!”

“Yes, I know,” Orochimaru said with a smile. “I’m rather busy at the moment, so I’ll be going now. Good day, Slytherin.”

“This is why it’s no good for someone like you to hang around the common rabble. You’re not learning any manners from them,” Draco sneered, motioning Crabbe and Goyle closer. “You won’t get anywhere without them, don’t you know?”

Orochimaru looked at the three interlopers – if he needed to go hand-to-hand, he didn’t imagine any of them being able to put up a fair fight. Crabbe and Goyle had mass but no training, and Malfoy was positively delicate. Imomeigetsu circled her lord’s neck, stretching out and coming face to face with Malfoy.

“<Ha! This little hatchling is a fool!>” she hissed sharply in his face, and the boy took a step back. Orochimaru reached out and slowly coaxed her back, scritching the bottom of her head. He flashed the hidden senbon tied to his wrist at Crabbe and Goyle, and they backed off as well.

“For the last time, Malfoy, you have no say in who I choose to fraternize with,” Orochimaru sighed, glancing at Imomeigetsu. “I don’t know who you think I am or what I should be, but you don’t get to decide that. As if you could actually make me do anything.” He didn’t bother to look at Malfoy as he turned away from the Slytherins sharply and walked down the hall.

“Potter,” Malfoy called out, “Are you with or against _us_?”

Orochimaru slowly turned around, and just for a moment, he felt his skin cool, his eyes tighten. He always did so hate questions of loyalty; he had none to give except to himself. And Malfoy’s _us,_ it could mean so many things, but none of them were of any interest to Orochimaru. Malfoy was watching him with a frown, scowling at his defeat, but he kept on looking between Orochimaru’s face and Imomeigetsu’s. Orochimaru smiled ever so slightly.

“You and I, I think we have two very different ideas about what a snake should be,” he said, stroking his python’s back of sandy scales. Malfoy scrunched his face in confusion, but Orochimaru did not elaborate further, and the boy quickly removed himself from the confrontation he started with a grunt of disgust.

“<What should we be?>” Imomeigetsu asked, “<What would you have us be?>”

“<I think you should be free to choose. I am more interested in how you grow than what path you choose to take. But humans always put such binary concepts on something that cannot be bisected. We are not inherently evil, and it would do this House well to learn that while they still carry _his_ name.>”

Orochimaru made his way to the Potions classroom without further interruption and stopped in front of its dungeon doors. He didn’t bother to knock and pushed the creaky doors open, striding into the damp classroom. Snape was crouched over his desk, furiously grading papers.

“What do you want,” Snape growled, not looking up from his papers. Orochimaru walked up to his desk, shoving the book under Snape’s nose. Snape looked up, his face partially hidden by his dark greasy hair, and did a double take at the snake curled around his head. He pushed the book back to Orochimaru.

“Students are only allowed to bring toads, cats, rats, and owls, Potter. I would take away House points, but last I checked there weren’t any left,” he said with a smirk. “Or are you making friends with the critters now that your House has ostracized you?”

“Oh, I was already friends with her before I tried to cripple the Weasleys,” Orochimaru said, smiling at Imomeigetsu fondly. Snape eyed him with suspicion and a little bit of alarm. “Are you not partial to snakes, being the Slytherin Head of House?”

“It is a symbol of...mixed meaning in our society. I’ve never been one for herpetology anyways,” he grit out. “What do you need, Potter? I presume Flitwick has sent you as errand boy for your detention?”

Orochimaru thrust the book into Snape’s face again. ”Delivery for you.”

Snape snatched the book out of his hands, quickly flipping through the pages and becoming more and more irritated as he realized what it was.

“He had this for so long I forgot I even loaned it and got a new copy. Get rid of it, Potter.” Snape tossed the book onto his desk and carried on with his grading. Orochimaru flipped it open to the cover page. _Cantarella e altri veleni_ was written in red ink – _what did Flitwick need a book on poisons for?_ he wondered.

“An interesting reading choice,” Orochimaru mumbled.

Snape scoffed in annoyance. “That’s his own business. Get out, Potter.”

“No, I don’t think so,” Orochimaru said sharply, quickly exuding killing intent directed at his least-favorite teacher. Snape froze, and slowly looked back up at Orochimaru.

“Do you wish to be further punished, Mr. Potter? I detest arrogant little children who would try to trample their way to whatever they want.” His hand moved slowly towards his wand on his desk, but Imomeigetsu was faster, and she slithered around his hand tightly with a warning hiss.

“And I detest being strung up as your strawman and given inferior ingredients during class,” Orochimaru whispered, looking at his teacher right in the eyes. “Yet I do not understand why you’ve done so since our first day together. Perhaps we can figure this out together.”

Snape looked at him with fury. “Do tell me what _analysis_ you’ve done, Ravenclaw.”

Orochimaru smiled. “You were a Death Eater, or so the rumors go.” Snape flinched, and Orochimaru’s smile widened ever so slightly at that confirmation. “But the headmaster has hired you as Potions teacher, and he would not dare put children in the hands of someone who could harm them…” he continued, “...or would he? Tell me, do you still follow Voldemort?”

“Do not say that name!” Snape hissed.

“What, will he rise from the dead if I say it thirteen times while looking in a mirror?” Orochimaru scoffed, but his smile dropped as Snape’s face paled. “...you know something.”

“No, I - “

Orochimaru dropped his books on Snape’s desk. “You will tell me what you know right now.” The killing intent thickened, heavy and oppressive and he watched Snape’s will crumple under it.

“I – he might be – alive – we don’t know - “ the man wheezed out through choking breaths.

“Who is we?”

“Everyone!” Snape hissed, “Surely even you know they never found his body!”

“Yes, but you know something specific,” Orochimaru hissed back, leaning forward, “Tell me.”

“It’s – it’s dangerous, far too dangerous, no.”

“Zero House points for Ravenclaw would say otherwise. _Where is he?_ ”

“And what would you do? Kill him?”

“With great pleasure,” Orochimaru cackled, “His life for my parents’.”

Snape scowled. “And not for justice for all the families we destroyed?”

“No, I have no use for such idealistic charity for people I neither know nor care for,” Orochimaru said coldly, “Where. Is. He.”

Snape looked up at the small boy seemingly towering over his desk, a familiar, fearful aura around them like the heaviest of weights on his shoulders, digging into the skin with acidic, burning hatred. When _that wizard_ threw it around _,_ cowing even the most brazen and willful of his own Death Eaters into submission, it was fueled by magic, backed fully by the emotional force of a heart full of hate and little more. _T_ _his_ intent – this _bloodthirst –_ was cold and calculating, that of a predator clinically butchering its prey. This was not how a Wizard operated, but Snape knew Muggles weren’t like this either, and Snape wondered where in the hell Dumbledore had left Potter.

“We don’t know,” Snape said quietly, “But he’s looking for something. An artifact to bring him back to his full power.”

“And where and what is this artifact?”

“I _cannot_ say,” Snape hissed, mustering up the courage to look the boy right in the eyes, those horrifically familiar eyes, colder than ever before. Orochimaru tilted his head, and nodded. This, he was familiar with.

“Understood. How ugly, to have your words chained to your life,” he spat. Root would never cease to be a bitter memory.

“We got sidetracked, let’s go back to my original question, Professor,” Orochimaru sighed, letting up just a hair on his killing intent, “To put it bluntly, what is your problem with me?”

Snape sat up in his seat, pointedly not looking at Orochimaru, and he refused to talk. Orochimaru frowned in annoyance again.

“Favoritism for your own House and hatred for your rivals, I can attribute to a _rotten_ personality, and you’ve certain got that, but I’ve seen your behavior is agnostic of blood status. You will just as easily take points from a Gryffindor pureblood as you would a Ravenclaw Muggleborn, so this has nothing to do with your ideological beliefs, whatever they are these days. Or maybe you think all the non-Slytherins as blood traitors,” Orochimaru said with a cute, insufferable smile, “But you try to make my life in particular more difficult than it needs to be, so it must be something to do with _me_ personally.”

“Arrogant little narcissist, just like your father,” Snape muttered. “You even look like him.”

Orochimaru froze. “I look like him?” The intent retracted immediately, and Snape could feel his ability to breathe unconsciously come back. “Did you know my mother too?”

The teacher inhaled sharply. “Get out, Potter, or I’ll recommend you for expulsion.”

Orochimaru opened his mouth, but closed it when he saw how sickly Snape was looking now. His face was nearly white as a sheet, and he shook quietly in his chair.

 _I pushed him too far, he won’t cooperate for a while,_ Orochimaru silently berated to himself. He nodded, and picked up his books. Imomeigetsu let go of Snape and slithered back to her master. Orochimaru made to leave without a word, but Snape held up a hand, silently asking him to wait. The professor took a few deep breaths, steeling himself.

“You have your mother’s eyes,” Snape said in a quiet, raw voice, “You look like your father, but you have Lily’s eyes. I know...how difficult it is to find photos of them.” He looked up at the boy on the other side of his desk, the layers of aloofness and cool confidence so swiftly peeled back to reveal the lonely child who knew just about nothing tangible about his own parents. He remembered then who exactly was supposed to be raising Potter, and his stomach dropped as he realized what Petunia did not do when she raised her own nephew. But...no more. No more memories were going to be dredged from his mind today – he didn’t feel able to withstand the grief.

“Off you go, Potter, Filius must be wondering where you are,” Snape said quietly, and went back to his work.

Orochimaru nodded silently and walked out, the heavy doors closing slowly behind him. He quickly climbed the stairs, ignoring the presence ungracefully tailing him, and slipped into the first lavatory he saw, just outside the landing to the third floor.

“<Young Lord?>” Imomeigetsu whispered in concern.

“<Please, Imomeigetsu, not now>,” he said softly, walking to the mirror by the sinks. He set the books by a windowsill, and Imomeigetsu slithered off his shoulders to curl up under the afternoon sunlight. He felt the tears well up in his eyes and saw them trail down his cheeks as he looked into the mirror. A face just like his father’s, but his mother’s eyes. Two people who hid in plain sight until they couldn’t, not important enough to have public photos, faces that could only be recalled by friends long dead or too distant, too murky in the fog of time and memory. He had only seen artistic renditions of them, but this was the first time time anyone had actually confirmed anything.

Sage, at least in his last life he could _remember_ his parents’ faces and what pieces made up his own. His fingers were bone white against the sink bowl.

“<Damn that man>,” he hissed violently under his breath, staring holes into his own reflection. “<DAMN HIM!>” The porcelain shattered under his grip, his fingers slashed open by the sharp edges. Imomeigetsu watched him as he absently brought his hands to his mouth and whispered healing spells, watched the blood drip down to the tile as cuts knit themselves back together.

“<I will kill him with my own two hands>,” he whispered with a stuttering breath, hands covering his face, twisting the metal of his glasses and threatening to crush the lens, “<He will come here, and I will finish what I started. I swear it.>”

He took off his glasses and charmed the warped frames back into place, splashed some cold water from a non-broken sink onto his face, and picked up his books. Imomeigetsu slithered off of them and remained under the sun, pressing her snout to his hands, not letting him leave until she was satisfied that she couldn’t seen any scars. Malfoy was waiting for him outside the lavatory, alone, gawking at Orochimaru in horror, but if he said anything Orochimaru didn’t hear it. and by the time he returned to Flitwick’s office he looked just as balanced as he had when he left.

“Welcome back – “ Flitwick started, but he frowned when he saw his student was not as empty handed as he expected. “I thought I asked you to return the books, Mr. Potter?”

Orochimaru shrugged, and Flitwick laughed and shook his head.

“I suppose it’s never too early to get started on your personal library,” Flitwick chuckled, bemused, “You’re dismissed for the evening.” He waved the boy away, and Orochimaru made his way back to Ravenclaw Tower. The door to the common room swung open, and he walked into a world where he either did not exist, or was the lowliest existence of all. Almost no one wanted to look at him. Orochimaru didn’t get it – House points meant nothing in the grand scheme of things.

“Hey, Harry,” Cho said quietly, writing in a journal in her lap, curled up in the armchair by a fireplace. She smiled at him as she did every day and he nodded at her, trying his best to smile back at her. She was a bastion of kindness in a House that wanted nothing more to be done with him, but today, he couldn’t bring himself to even try to reciprocate.

“Are you okay?” she mouthed to him, frowning. He nodded silently and walked past her, back up to his bedroom. It was empty, thankfully, but none of the boys greeted him as they trickled in through the late hours of the evening and fell asleep in their beds one by one. Orochimaru himself was the last to close his eyes, once he was sure he was the last one awake, if only for a few hours of shut-eye the basilisk called for him again.

\---

The child with black hair and yellow eyes that entered the hidden passage in the lavatory scared Myrtle, but tonight she finally found the courage to talk to him.

“Wh-wh-who are you?” she whispered as the child hissed at the faucet and waited for it to open up. He turned to her and she shrank back at those eyes like a _snake_ ’s _again those_ _yellow_ _eyes she’d seen them_ _**-** _

_“_ Oh, you’re Moaning Myrtle. The basilisk told me she’d killed you. Why haven’t you passed on?” he asked, bored.

“You can talk? Are you that monster’s child?” Myrtle cried. The child looked to the side, thinking, and shrugged.

“I think I’m the ‘hatchling’ to a few snakes at this point,” he admitted. He didn’t flinch as Myrtle rushed him, screaming in his face.

“MURDERER! GO AWAY! I HATE YOU!” she yelled, tears welling up in her ghostly eyes. It was because of things like this _monster child_ that she was -

“Correct, but I’m not your killer. Who are you to fault a basilisk for her nature, anyways? Stupid child,” he sighed, turning back and walking down the passage, Myrtle sobbing and screaming behind him. He wandered the stone caverns, stepping over new death traps slipped under rocks and tucked into walls. This was _his_ Chamber now, regardless of whether or not Voldemort was not truly dead. If that villain thought he’d be able to return to his old haunt, he’d have to earn it back, painfully, and with bloodshed.

But tonight, fortunately, was like any other, as Orochimaru sank the pseudochakra into the stone door to the Chamber and walked in, his snakes slithering at his feet. The basilisk was curled in the center of the main platform, eyes closed. She raised her head and drew closer to the boy, nudging him with the tip of her snout.

“<Hatchling.>”

“<Teacher. What will I learn tonight?>”

“<Nothing. I wish to roam the forest.>”

Orochimaru blinked. Professor Kettleburn had just restarted excursions into the Forest, and early on in his tutoring he’d explained to the basilisk why the snakes had moved to the Chamber in the first place. She’d been surprisingly accepting of his reasoning, but if she’d insisted now with that knowledge, then he wasn’t going to stop her. He’d figured something like this was inevitable anyways. Who was he to cage one as grand as her?

“<Will you need me to open the Chamber door? I took the liberty to add a security system to the passage down here.>”

The basilisk huffed in laughter. “<No, hatchling, I know of other ways. Come, follow me.>” She slithered back into her cavern, and Orochimaru sped after her, mentally shaking off the awkwardness of entering a cavern shaped like a man’s mouth.

“<Young Lord, didn’t you want to check the Map?>” Imomeigetsu asked, curling tighter around Orochimaru’s torso and poking her head out of the yukata. Orochimaru slowed down to a trot and pulled the Marauder’s Map out from his yukata. The lines of the ink blotted into the castle map, and he watched the dot that was himself move farther and farther away from the castle, winding south and almost off the page. But before he went out of bounds of the mapped boundaries, he dropped his henge. On the page, his name shifted, the characters rearranging themselves to “Harry Potter”.

“<Well then. That’s a disappointment,>,” Orochimaru sighed, bringing up his henge again. _I’ll be holding onto this a little longer than I planned,_ he told himself as he slipped the Map into his yukata. No one needed to know that Harry Potter was anything other than a Wizarding child for now. Messrs. Weasley would simply have to make do without the Map.

It was not even 10 minutes until he saw the vine covered entrance that opened deep into the Forbidden Forest. The basilisk was waiting for him and he leapt onto her head. Like this, they could both open their eyes, without fear of death for Orochimaru.

“<It is warmer than I remember. Is it truly autumn?>” the basilisk hummed, slowly winding her way through the black trees.

“<Yes, Teacher, not even a full lunar cycle since the equinox>,” Orochimaru said, sitting down cross legged on her head. He inhaled the fresh forest air, a far cry from the stuffiness of the cavern. It was unseasonably warm, but comfortable nonetheless.

“<Ah! The moon! I had forgotten how she looked. She is still beautiful and radiant>,” the basilisk said, winding her way up a blackened tree as thick as a house. Orochimaru too gazed up at the benevolent moon ( _mercifully_ benevolent), pale as he was in this form, and he looked around at the forest canopy, all dark sea, the falling leaves like waves pushing towards the castle far in the distance.

“<How long has it been since you were last outside, Teacher?>”

“<Since I was a young hatchling myself, in my first master’s care. I was barely larger than you are now>,” she chuckled, though it was bittersweet, “<I went to sleep barely grown, and I woke up aged and ancient, nearing my death, my scales never to shine under the sun. How wonderful it feels, to be alive in this forest. I have missed it so, this life, as all wild snakes of these lands should enjoy. It is critical to our magic as well.>”

“<How so?>”

“<The magic that exists humans is stretched thin and taut, but out here it is relaxed, unstressed. Can you not feel it?>”Orochimaru shook his head.

“<No, not really.>” He had an ominous feeling about what was coming next, because this was sounding an awful lot like nature chakra theory.

“<Am I going to have to sit in nature completely still for long periods of time?>”

“<Yes. Do you not find this acceptable?>”

Orochimaru whined and flopped down onto the basilisk’s head. Meditation was _boring_ , even if it was important in any training regime, and he told his teacher as much. He’d rather read a dictionary, because then at least he’d learn new words. The basilisk laughed aloud at him, harsh, wheezing hisses echoing above the trees.

“<We will be doing meditation out here from now on, hatchling, while I hold my court. It has been far too long>,” the basilisk said as she descend the trees and curled in a great pile on the forest floor, awaiting her snakes.

“<Yes, Teacher>,” Orochimaru said, resigned to long nights of boredom as he knelt on her head and closed his eyes, relaxing his tense frown, his breaths becoming shallower and shallower, the bobbing of the basilisk’s head soothing him, and the soft whispers and hisses of the snakes soothing into ambience -

 _Sensei was cross-legged on the hill in Training Ground 26; still_ _a younger_ _man,_ _his spiky brown hair and goatee_ _not_ _yet_ _touched by the gray of age, but Orochimaru could see the wrinkles start to crease his face ever so slightly as he walked up the grassy hill, Tsunade and Jiraiya bickering some distance behind him._ _He hadn’t been paying attention, but he thought they were maybe arguing over the best ramen toppings._ _Sensei opened his eyes and let out a breath as his student approached; he_ _brushed out the wrinkles in his black jumpsuit._

 _“What ever are those two doing, Orochimaru?”_ _Sensei_ _asked, looking_ _at_ _his favorite student with a fond smile. The boy shrugged, face unmoving, and sat down beside him._

_“What were you doing, Sensei?”_

_“Meditating. It reinforces the spiritual energy of the body - ”_

_“Which makes your chakra stronger,” Orochimaru finished, nodding, “_ _Akimichi-sensei at the Academy taught us that. He said it’s very important for all shinobi to meditate regularly. I don’t see many_ _of the chuunin or jounin_ _doing that though. Why is that, Sensei?”_

 _“In war, such time to maintain internal peace is fleeting,” Sensei admitted, “Many find more active ways to enhance their spiritual energy, but I find that meditating clears the mind better than any other._ _The decisions I make as Hokage are difficult and costly; a rash choice could send dozens of Konoha shinobi to unnecessary deaths._ _So, I come out here and meditate. Do you understand, Orochimaru?_ _”_

 _“Yes, Sensei,” Orochimaru said, mimicking_ _his teacher’s pose, “I will make sure meditation is part of my training regime from now on.” He closed his eyes, staying perfectly still, the faint but increasingly louder sounds of Jiraiya and Tsunade shouting at each other the only sound around them._

_“Generally speaking, it’s easier to meditate when those two troublemakers aren’t making a scene,” Sensei said softly. “Why don’t they have that energy for their mission reports?”_

_Orochimaru said nothing. The sun was warm against his back._

_\---_

_“ <_A message from the hatchling’s nest?>” the basilisk asked, breaking Orochimaru out of his trance. The moon above had cross a good distance of the night sky. He looked down at the single white snake arching its head up at the two of them.

“<Aye, your Highness, from the old adder Pensie. Shall I recite it?>” the little white snake asked, and both the basilisk and Orochimaru nodded.

 _Young Lord,_ _hatchling,_

_I would start this message by asking how you were doing at school, but given the rumors I’ve heard recently, I can only assume that you are having too much fun. What did I say about making a scene? Especially with snakes?_

“<But Imomeigetsu had fun>,” Orochimaru interrupted.

“<There’s more, Young Lord.>”

_Natha says he’s proud of you and that you should try the growing spell on him when you come back home. Please do it in the forest if you must._

“<I think a basilisk could fit in the house.>”

“<Please, Young Lord, I’m not done.>”

_Speaking of home, we must inform you that the mother Dursley moved all your items to the upstairs room, the one that the son used to store all his old and broken toys. Fret not, we hid your weapons before the woman cleaned your cupboard and brought them to your new room when she was finished. They are safely stored under the third floorboard away from the windowsill. The little ones loved the faces she made when she had to move the animal bones we gifted you. I suppose we must respect her for not tossing them in the bin._

Orochimaru raised his eyebrows – he’d gotten no mail from the Dursleys since he started school, and to say that anything resembling kindness towards him from his aunt was out of character for his aunt was an understatement of an understatement.

_The father Dursley just got his arm out of the plaster, but he doesn’t bluster as much anymore. He is quite nervous in the kitchen these days. The boy is the same as always, and you have all but disappeared from his mind at the moment, although he now favors his father more. After you left, you must know that father Dursley tried to have you removed from the house, but Petunia refused to send you away. She was rather vocal in her objections._

“<Did Pensie say why - >”

“<I’m not finished! I worked super hard to memorize all this and if you keep interrupting I might miss something, Young Lord!>” the snake cried. Orochimaru shut his mouth and waved for the snake to continue. He wasn’t going to abuse his way of getting around owls.

_Blanche and Noire wish to hear from you. They miss you very much, and every day they ask me when you will come back to Privet Drive. I do not know your winter holiday plans, but if you wish to suffer these humans for a few weeks and return to the nest, we will not object. Natha, my lovely, cranky mate, says you should remain with Her Highness and learn our magic, but deep down I know he misses you too. As do I, hatchling. This house is empty without you._

_It may please you to know that your tutelage under Her Highness has brought the return of our magic to other snakes on the Isle. We snakes do love to gossip, and those snakes of Hogwarts Castle and the Forbidden Forest that have watched you learn, studied beside you, have been charitable enough to share their rediscovered knowledge. I am old, and even the slightest bit of magic exhausts my scales, but how lovely it is to see the young ones practice even simple color changes! Blanche and Noire have been picking up the old traditions slowly, but already I see a knack for magic that I saw in you when you were only a few years of age. Blanche practices and practices just as you did in the forest, and Noire can go on for hours about lectures that wind their way to our little nest. They’ve learned so much from you, and Natha and I are very proud of you all._

“<She was _very_ insistent that she get a response>,” the white snake added, looking up pointedly at the boy seated on the basilisk’s head.

“<In the rush of school, I forgot to call back home>,” he said with a fond smile. He hadn’t forgotten about his four snakes at all; the bed felt empty without their scales curled around him. “<How long of a message can you handle?>”

“<I’m always up for a challenge>,” the little messenger dared, and the boy grinned something wicked as he launched into the tale of how he met his new friends, human and serpentine, his teachers who he somewhat liked despite the simple lectures, and the rote monotony of daily school life in a magical castle where the paintings talked and the stairs aimed to mislead.

\---

Cho was worried for Harry, more so than usual, as October ran through its red leaves. Where once her friend, if prompted with the right questions, might have quietly gone on a long ramble, now he only spoke one sentence, or just a word, short, terse. No one else but his Gryffindor friends and that Slytherin that tailed him had noticed, but then again, much of her own House had stopped being civil with Harry. Truthfully, the snake incident worried her, because snakes were Dark creatures that should never be trusted, but she knew Harry was a good boy despite what everyone said about ‘Scary Potter the Slytherin’. It wasn’t until she read the Prophet on Halloween morning and the headline celebrating the anniversary of You-Know-Who’s defeat that it all clicked in her head.

“Oh, Harry,” she whispered to herself, trying to suppress the tears welling in her eyes. She stood up, knocking over her cup of pumpkin juice as she ran over to the other side of the table and tackled Orochimaru in a hug. He choked on his tea mid-sip.

“...I’m not going to pretend that I understand what this is about,” he said, wiping the tea from his face. Cho hugged him tighter.

“You know you can talk to me about anything, okay?” she whispered into his hair, “I don’t want to see you hurt so much.” Her hand gripped the newspaper tighter, and Orochimaru glanced at the headline. His mood immediately soured at the reminder in giant black ink scrolling across the page. Cho was too nice, her heart too loving; even Tsunade, the most loving shinobi he ever had the pleasure of knowing, hadn’t made such a big deal when she found out Orochimaru’s parents died in the line of duty. Then again, all shinobi children were quickly inured to death, especially in wartime. It was a privilege of growing up in peacetime that Cho grieved with him as he grieve for his parents’ deaths.

“Okay, Cho,” he said, awkwardly patting her back.

“I mean it,” she said with a little more strength, “You’ve been putting up with everyone’s rubbish and I don’t know how you do it. You don’t have to be strong all the time. Especially today.”

 _Oh, that’s so very untrue,_ _otherwise we wouldn’t be having this conversation_ , he thought sadly. “Thank you for thinking about me. However, I would like some space today.”

Cho reluctantly let him go, wiping the tears from her eyes. “Okay, Harry. I understand – well, to be honest, I don’t, but if that’s what you need.” She hugged him again, even tighter, and went back to her seat, where her second-year friends crowded her and pestered her why Potter (not Scary Potter, never Scary Potter to Cho, they’d found that out the hard way) made her cry. Most of the other students around him, Ravenclaws and Slytherins alike, gave him curious looks and went back to their meals.

It was a light day of coursework, just Charms and Flying for the first-year Ravenclaws, and Orochimaru was left to his own devices for the afternoon. The sky was overcast and dreary, as it had been for the past week, but he made the hike to the hill with the willow tree overlooking the lake. If that Uchiha student of his was still alive, he would’ve deemed it a quality brooding spot. Most of the other students that normally had a word or two to throw at him had picked up on his terrible mood quite easily and let him be, all save for Malfoy who acted like it was another day to bother him in Charms. Admittedly, Malfoy was making quite a bit of progress with Orochimaru’s help, nearing the top of the class, and it was satisfying to watch him refine his spells bit by bit, but every sentence not about class was an inquiry, a copy of that same question from weeks before: are you with us, or are you against us? My father says you should be with us, and I think so too, was left unsaid.

(It would probably be pretty trivial for him to swipe a few of the letters the boy Malfoy seemed to get daily. He’d have to ask Koeda and Ogawa to intercept them later.)

 _Do they know that Voldemort is still alive?_ he wondered, darkly. He had a sudden urge to stab something, but the tree seemed slightly more magical and sentient than usual , and he didn’t want to incur the wrath of whatever magic it harbored. He curled up closer, gritting his teeth. _What is Voldemort looking for in the castle? Why is it even being stored somewhere where Voldemort could easily find a hostage? Who brought it here?_

 _Who made an Unbreakable Vow with Snape?_ he thought. It had been a quick search to figure out what would make the teacher unable to speak the words, and it made him curious who was on the other end of the Vow. Dumbledore, most likely; time and time again, the wizard popped up around his life, and prolific and powerful as he may be for a wizard, it did not explain why _he_ was in charge of Orochimaru’s surveillance. That seemed like something the Minister of Magic would order – it seemed out of scope of the Supreme Mugwump or the Chief Warlock, and certainly way above the paygrade of the Headmaster of Hogwarts. None of his titles could also explain why he would have a valuable object that could bring someone back from near death stored somewhere in the castle.

 _I should see if Edo Tensei works with the pseudochakra_ , he thought absently, and remembered with much spite that he had never been to his parents’ gravestone. The Dursleys never said a word about where they were buried, and his blood boiled ever so much when he had f ound out where they were buried from a contemporary history book. Godric’s Hollow, on the other end of the isle . Before his dramatic departure, h e had wondered, he had searched the home time after time when the Dursleys had left him behind on some weekend outing, but he never saw any evidence they had ever existed. Petunia was his mother’s _sister_ , and she had never told him.

A single snowflake floated through the branches and landed on Orochimaru’s glasses. The sun was setting, and he went back inside to the warm castle for Halloween dinner. Someone had put up decorations around the school when he was out, and he smiled at the misshapen gourds heckling students making their way to the Great Hall.

 _The floating jack-o-lanterns_ _are cute_ , he had to admit. Less so was Quirrell slamming open the doors halfway through mealtime and screaming about a troll in the dungeon. Even less so was the ensuing stampede to the doors, but it gave Orochimaru time to think as the teachers and prefects ushered the younger students back to the dorms. The troll’s timing was quite disruptive, right in the middle of a holiday meal. Plus, there were no mountains tall enough nearby that could be expected to be troll habitats, so how did a troll get into the dungeon? What was Quirrell doing in the dungeons anyways? His office was on the second floor.

 _There is something precious hidden in the castle_ , he remembered. And what better way to occupy those who could reasonably apprehend an invader than the teachers and the headmaster? As the prefects ushered their panicking students back to their dorms, Orochimaru concealed his presence with the pseudochakra, stepping to a wall and waiting out the rush of students and staff. He brought up his henge to replace the cover and dashed up to the third floor.

The tail end of a black cloak went into the inconspicuous hallway in the banned corridor, and Orochimaru silently creeped over to the edge of the entrance to the locked door. He stopped as he heard -

“ - doing here?” Snape nearly yelled.

“S-S-Severus! What are _you_ doing here?”

Orochimaru peeked his head out from behind the wall to see two of his professors at a standoff. Quirrell blocked the open doorway with his body, shielding a giant, sleeping canine creature. Its head was twice as large as Quirrell himself. _No wonder I smelled dog here_.

“I’m not fool enough to fall for that, Quirinus. Explain yourself!” Snape said, advancing quickly towards Quirrell. The man backed up in a panic.

“Shh! Don’t wake it up!” he whispered, glancing back at the dog monster in terror.

“Then why have you opened the door to _that?”_ Snape roared, and with that the dog woke up with a snort. It yawned and looked down on the two men in its lair, growling at them in triplicate-

 _A three-headed dog?!_ Orochimaru’s eyes narrowed as he saw the heads shake back and forth. Blue-furred and built like hounds, they snapped at Quirrell, nearly taking off his head. He screamed and pushed past Snape, shoving his coworker to the ground and running out the hallway. Orochimaru threw up another concealing barrier before the teacher ran down the hall and saw him. As soon as Quirrell was out of sight, Orochimaru looked back down at the hallway.

Snape was scrambling away from the dog’s heads, but his legs tangled in his cloak, and the heads were snapping closer and closer. _He wouldn’t be able to get away, not without injury,_ _but he’s not drawing his wand_ _–_ _is he trying not to injure the dog_ _? And suppose Snape really was injured, how would that affect Potions class?_ _What’s the likelihood we get someone more or less competent than Snape?_

Upon that thought, it was an easy choice. Orochimaru shunshined behind his teacher, grabbed him by the armpits, and leapt backwards. The center head of the three-headed dog chomped down where Snape’s legs had only been a moment before, and all three heads howled as Orochimaru kicked the door closed with a loud bang. He dropped the teacher down on the ground. Snape sat facing the door, stunned.

“You’re lucky I was here,” Orochimaru snapped. Snape turned around, eyes wide in shock at the eerie child standing over him. They mostly looked human, but those eyes – he wished he would never see slit pupils in human eyes ever again.

“I don’t care if you tell Dumbledore. You can’t stop me from finding whatever it is that dog’s guarding. I’ve heard that an old friend’s looking for it too.”

Snape snatched his wand and threw a Stunning Curse at Orochimaru, but the boy dodged it easily and fled down the hall, far too fast for Snape to keep up with. He dashed down the stairs, dropping the henge and avoiding the fresh scents of human, down to the dungeons, following the rank odor of troll – and ran right into two friends scrambling towards someone’s hysterical sreaming.

“Harry! Why are you down here?” Hermione screeched as they nearly slammed into each other.

“I got lost on the way of life – no, Hermione, I wanted to see a real life troll!” he said, eyes glittering in excitement, “It took me a while to escape my prefect. Today’s very exciting, don’t you think?”

“Except Neville’s down there, c’mon, we’ve got to go help him!” Ron shouted in a panic, tugging on their robes. Orochimaru’s face became deadly serious and he ran behind the two; this was a mission now – save Neville Longbottom.

\---

“In my defense,” Orochimaru said later, the next day, scrubbing his robe of the stench of burst pipes and mountain troll in a wooden washbin at his feet, “I didn’t actually do anything. It was all Ron and Hermione.”

“Uh-huh,” Cho said unbelievingly, levitating his damp and newly cleaned sweater onto a clothesline tied between a stake and a cherry tree in the middle of the south courtyard. “And they had the bright idea to burst the pipes?”

“Perhaps I was in a...consulting role?” Orochimaru tried, looking up at Cho. She was not impressed. “I’m not sorry.”

“I know you’re not, Harry. You frighten me sometimes.”

“Excellent, it’s good to know your instincts are working. By the way, could you remind me why we’re doing this - “ he waved his soapy hands at the robe in the bin “- the hard way again? I know cleaning spells that could - “

“Harry James Potter, you can be such! A! Git!” she shouted, holding Orochimaru by his undershirt collar and shaking him in time with each word. “I was worried _sick_ about you! What if you had gotten hurt and the teachers couldn’t get to you in time?”

“Your concern and kindness are very much appreciated, Cho. I frequently wonder why you’ve stuck by me all this time.”

Cho froze, bottom lip quivering _,_ remembering the sad little boy she met in a library all those years ago who seemed to breathe magic like her mother did, the boy who walked past gossip and jeers with only the slightest of sneers, with courage (or disdain) that she couldn’t fathom having. She had to be nice, she had to be kind.

“You’re not a bad person, Harry. I don’t care what your family or the rest of the school says, you’re one of my best mates,” she whispered.

Orochimaru looked to the side, down at the ground. His heart felt warm and fuzzy, a long-forgotten feeling. “I see. Thank you.”

“But I’m still making you do this the hard way!” She hauled him back up and pushed him back down on the cushion by the washbin. “If the teachers won’t punish you for nearly getting yourself killed, I will!”

 _What a child_ , Orochimaru thought, rolling his eyes. “Don’t you have Quidditch practice, Madam Seeker? Why are you wasting time with the laundry?”

“Practice got canceled because Captain and the Beaters got the flu snogging Hogsmeade townies. Idiots,” she muttered violently under her breath, “We were supposed to go over strategies against the Hufflepuffs!”

Orochimaru smiled as Cho ranted about the finer points of youth Quidditch. He looked up at the bright blue sky above, not a cloud in sight. The air was cold, his hands were freezing, but he could live with that if it meant he could have these moments of peace.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Due to real-life obligations, the next chapter will be uploaded a week late on March 25, 2021.
> 
> As always, thank you to everyone who's kudos'd, bookmarked, commented, or otherwise interacted with this fic!


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